María J. Fernández Torres holds a degree in Chemistry (1992) and a PhD in Chemical Engineering (1996) from the University of Alicante. Since 1994, she has taught in the area of Chemical Engineering at this university, accumulating extensive teaching experience in both undergraduate and postgraduate studies.

Throughout her career, she has taught, among others, courses in Introduction to Chemical Engineering, Chemical Reactor Design and Transport Phenomena (that is, the study, both separately and in a coupled manner, of momentum, energy and mass transfer). Since 2015, she has incorporated COMSOL Multiphysics into the teaching of this subject for the numerical study of transport problems and computational fluid dynamics.

Some of the teaching materials she has developed over the years are available on her personal website: https://personal.ua.es/es/fernandez/material.html

https://diq.ua.es/en/video-lectures.html

Since the 2025-2026 academic year, she has also been part of the teaching staff of the course Fluid Mechanics and Aerospace Propulsion in the Bachelor's Degree in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Alicante. This new teaching activity has allowed her to broaden her experience in fluid mechanics towards specific applications in the aerospace field.

She has carried out postdoctoral stays at the University of Nottingham, the University of Cambridge and Babe¿-Bolyai University. Her interest in teaching and internationalization has also led her to teach Chemical Engineering in English at several foreign universities, including the University of Nottingham, the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town.

After attending several sessions of the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002, she progressively redirected part of her research activity towards problems related to sustainability. She has also undertaken additional training in areas such as toxicology, ecology and green chemistry, including the course “Educators Seminar on Teaching Sustainability”, organized by the Center for Sustainability at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zürich, in 2005.

Her research activity focuses mainly on the simulation, design and optimization of chemical processes, with particular attention to the energy, economic and environmental analysis of processes and the use of simulation tools such as Aspen HYSYS. She has published numerous papers in international scientific journals indexed in JCR.