Dr. Fernandez-Sesma is a tenured Professor and the Chair of the Department of Microbiology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS). Her research focuses on the modulation of innate immunity by viruses, like dengue, influenza and others. She participates in several multi-investigator OMICS projects to study human immune responses to infection and vaccination. She is internationally renowned and has given over 200 seminars at academic institutions and scientific meetings nationally and internationally, often as keynote speaker. She has co-authored over 100 publications in virology and immunology journals and served on the editorial board of Journal of Virology, mSphere and PLoS Pathogens. She has served on NIAID, DoD and CDC study sections and was member of the Scientific Council of the Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (DMID) Division at NIH/NIAID from 2018-2022.

Dr. Fernandez-Sesma is also very committed to graduate education and mentoring and served as co-director of the Microbiology Main Training Area (MTA) of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at ISMMS for 10 years. She has mentored multiple graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in her laboratory and has served on >70 thesis advisory committees at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) at ISMMS and elsewhere.

Since 2022 she is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and in 2024 she was awarded the 2024 ACES-Margarita Salas award among other awards. She is the Chair of the 2025 “Viruses and Cells” Gordon Conference and serves in the Scientific council of the Institute Pasteur, Paris and of several other prestigious institutions. In March 2023, Dr. Fernandez-Sesma was named Chair of the Department of Microbiology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) and received an endowed professorship at ISMMS.