Oscar Hernandez works as a software developer/engineer at the Driving Safety Research Institute. He has applied his skills to real-time, 3D rendering, integrating hardware and third-party software, managing source code and builds. He is involved on a team in charge of maintaining and supporting the miniSim, a portable and versatile driving simulator software platform ideally suited to human factors and medical research, is available in car and heavy-truck editions, with hardware configurations ranging from desktop to ¼-cab to full cab simulators. He also works on development custom sub-systems for the NADS-1 simulator, e.g., development an application which integrate sensors that produce haptic alerts to drivers. He also works on developing scenarios and sub-systems which enable coupling of software and hardware components on autonomous driving simulations.

Prior to joining DSRI, Dr. Hernandez worked developing software solution in Water Resources and Computational Fluid Dynamics at the University of Iowa for six years as graduate assistant, post-doctoral scholar, and water resource engineer. His primary roles were to integrate physical processes into software and improve workflows, which helps unveil a better understanding of ecosystem processes. He also collaborates on different projects, e.g., developed of a flood map database for the state of Iowa.

Dr. Hernandez's Ph.D. thesis at the University of Iowa involved the development of computation fluid dynamics solutions to improve nutrient dynamics understanding in river flows. His Master of Science thesis in Hydro-informatics, at IHE Delft, The Netherlands, covered the development of Chaotic Software Models to predict storm surges in the North Sea. He also worked as assistant professor in Fluid Mechanics and Water Resources research at the Colombian Engineering School Julio Garavito at Bogota, Colombia.