His research is on signal and image processing, AI fundamentals and applications, HCI, forensics, and biometrics for security and human behavior analysis. He is actively involved in large EU projects in these topics (e.g., BIOSECURE, TABULA RASA and BEAT in the past; now IDEA-FAST, PRIMA and TRESPASS-ETN). Since 2016 he is Associate Editor for Elsevier's Information Fusion and IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Security, and since 2018 also for IEEE Trans. on Image Processing. He has been General Chair of the IAPR Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition (CIARP 2018) and the Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (IbPRIA 2019). Since 2020 he is member of the ELLIS Society.
Prof. Fierrez has received best papers awards at AVBPA, ICB, IJCB, ICPR, ICPRS, and Pattern Recognition Letters. He is also recipient of a number of world-class research distinctions, including: EBF European Biometric Industry Award 2006, EURASIP Best PhD Award 2012, Medal in the Young Researcher Awards 2015 by the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Miguel Catalan Award to the Best Researcher under 40 in the Community of Madrid in the general area of Science and Technology. In 2017 he has been also awarded the IAPR Young Biometrics Investigator Award, given to a single researcher worldwide every two years under the age of 40, whose research work has had a major impact in biometrics.