Ana E. Fernández was born and raised in Spain where she received a BA in English Philology. She has an MA in Teaching English as a Second Language from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a second MA in Hispanic Literary Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was Academic Dean of the English Summer Program at the Pontifical University of Comillas, Spain for 8 years and Chair of the Foreign Languages Department at Morgan Park Academy, Chicago for 2 years before joining the University of Iowa. Ana has been teaching at the University for more than 20 years.

Her current on-campus classes include Spanish Language Skills: Speaking and the course she created, Medical Spanish in Contemporary Society. Ana is also the organizer of the series “Talks About Medicine in Spanish” and the conversation event “Cafecito Cervantes.” In 2021, she received the CLAS Collegiate Teaching Award.