Ariel Fernandez is an Argentinian-American physical chemist, who held the Karl F. Hasselmann Professorship of Bioengineering at Rice University until 2011. He was born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina in 1957 and is a Principal Investigator at I. A. M. (Instituto Argentino de Matematica) in Buenos Aires. Formally trained as a mathematician, he earned a Ph. D. in chemical physics from Yale University in 1984 and pursued his research endeavors in Goettingen under the tutelage of Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen. His widely acclaimed research spans various areas of algebra (representation theory), physical chemistry, molecular biophysics, dehydron physics and more recently, molecular evolution and drug discovery...