Dr. Fernando is an Associate Professor at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada where, he is the stream coordinator for the Signal Processing and Communications Research group. He has one patent and has published about forty peer-reviewed international journal articles and conference papers. He completed the Ph.D. at the University of Calgary, Canada in affiliation with the TRLabs (2001). He worked for AT&T for three years as an R&D Engineer (94-97).

His research focuses on signal processing for cost-effective broadband multimedia delivery via optical, wireline and wireless networks. Dr. Fernando's work won the best research paper award in the Canadian Conference of Electrical and Computer Engineering for the year 2001. His student projects won both the first and second prize at Opto Canada - the SPIE regional conference in Ottawa in 2002. He has been awarded research grants and awards from the Finnish International Development Agency (FINNIDA), the Alberta Informatics Circle of Research Excellence (ICORE), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, the Canadian Foundation of Innovations (CFI) and the Ontario Innovations Trust Fund (OIT).

He is a Senior Member of IEEE, and a registered Professional Engineer (P. Eng.) in Ontario, Canada. He is the Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Toronto Chapter, a member of the Society of Photonic and Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE), and the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Personal Communications (TCPC). He is actively involved in many other professional societies and technical committees.