Fernando Lezama (PhD, 2014) is an Integrated Researcher at GECAD, Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development, ISEP, IPP. He received the PhD in ICTs from Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM), Mexico, in 2014. His research focuses on the application of computational intelligence, mathematical optimization, and market-oriented modeling to complex problems in power and energy systems, with particular emphasis on local energy systems, electricity markets, energy communities, flexibility, and demand response. In recent years, his work has increasingly addressed fairness-aware coordination, strategic behavior, and explainability in optimization for energy systems. Since 2017, he has coordinated GECAD’s interdisciplinary team on energy systems optimization, currently involving 2 PhD students and additional collaborators, with support from senior members, visiting researchers, and students. The team develops models and solution methods for transactive energy systems, local energy markets, energy communities, and energy resource management, contributing to several national and international R&D projects. In recent years, the team has also advanced toward explainable and human-centered AI for energy systems, integrating explainability principles into optimization and opening new research directions on XAI for forecasting, decision support, and fairness-aware energy management. This broadens the team’s scientific profile from high-performance optimization toward transparent, robust, and socially grounded energy intelligence. Dr. Lezama has participated in more than 10 international and 7 national projects and has accumulated relevant experience in project coordination and leadership. He has acted as PI in industrial R&D consultancy funded by Honda Research Institute Europe, as GECAD/ISEP coordinator of the CELTIC-NEXT F4iTECH project, and as GECAD/ISEP coordinator of the Portuguese project NGS-BP12. He also held coordination responsibilities in H2020 DOMINOES, including task leadership on business models and local market enabled demand response. More recently, he was awarded the FCT Individual Call to Scientific Employment Stimulus (CEECIND), 7th Edition, with the project FAIR-CI: Fairness-Aware Computational Intelligence for Optimizing Local Energy Systems, being ranked second in the Assistant Researcher category. He has organized +20 scientific events, including competitions, workshops, special sessions, and dissemination initiatives in computational intelligence for power and energy systems, supported by IEEE CIS and IEEE PES. He is one of the key organizers of the Evolutionary Computation in the Energy Domain competition series at major conferences such as PES-GM, CEC, and GECCO. He is Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence Review Journal (Springer), has served as guest editor of 5 special issues, and has performed +100 reviews in JCR-indexed journals. He is also a regular program committee member in international conferences in computational intelligence and energy systems. Fernando Lezama is author of more than 100 scientific publications, including 47 indexed journal papers, more than 80 conference papers, and 6 book chapters. He has +2800 citations on Google Scholar and an h-index of 26. He has supervised 4 MSc dissertations and co-supervised 10 more, in addition to several BSc projects and one international visiting PhD student. Since 2021, he has contributed to teaching activities at ISEP in the MSc in Power and Energy Systems, and he has also served as Visiting Professor at UNESP, Brazil, and at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China. His achievements have been recognized through distinctions such as IEEE Senior Member, co-chair of the IEEE ISATC Task Force on Computational Intelligence for the Energy Domain, and SNI-1 recognition by the Mexican national research system.