Melchor Fernández Fernández (Ourense, 1969) holds a PhD in Economics from the The Autonomous University of Barcelona and is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He is currently director of the Department of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis, coordinator of the Group of Analysis and Modelling in Economics (GAME), recognised by the Galician University System as a Competitive Reference Group, and coordinator of the PhD programme in Regional Development and Economic Integration. From November 2005 to January 2014, he was previously the director of the University Institute for the Study and Development of Galicia (IDEGA).

His research has focused on the evaluation of socio-economic policies with general equilibrium models, the planning and evaluation of social and health services, the economic analysis of the labour market, and the evaluation of the socio-economic impact of the Camino de Santiago. For his research on the Camino de Santiago, he received the 8th "Valentín Paz Andrade" Prize for research in economics in Galicia in 2021. In 2009 and 2021, he won the Lluis Fina Prize, awarded by the Asociación Española de Economía del Trabajo.  

Over the last 10 years, he has supervised 13 doctoral theses (three of which have been awarded special doctoral prizes), which have resulted in numerous international publications of reference, including contributions to the analysis of tourism and the socio-economic impact of the Camino de Santiago on a local scale. As a recent example, the paper entitled “Covid-19 and tourism vulnerability”, published in the journal Tourism Management Perspectives 38, is currently rated as a ‘Highly Cited Paper’ according to WOS (articles with enough citations to be included in the top 1% of articles in the academic field of Social Sciences).

Since 2000, he has participated in more than 85 research projects and contracts. Of these, he was the principal investigator in 53. Generally, the main objective of these research projects is to advise the public administration on relevant aspects and issues that require the development of new analysis methodologies or the adaptation of existing ones. Among all these projects, those related to the planning and evaluation of socio-health services and the research carried out on the socio-economic impact of the Camino de Santiago stand out.