Dr. Fermin D. Adriano is a highly accomplished academician, scholar, writer and policy adviser to key government officials. He once served as Information Director of the UP System, and Vice-Chancellor of UP Los Banos, where he took early retirement with the rank of Professor. He was a Board Member of the former Manila Chronicle while at the same time serving as its Editorial Consultant and regular columnist. He writes a weekly column for the Manila Times. He had published a number of scholarly books and articles on Mindanao development issues, Bangsamoro peace and conflict concerns, rural development, agriculture, and agrarian reform. He was a policy adviser to successive Secretaries of Agriculture, Secretary of Agrarian Reform, and successive presidential assistants/advisers for Mindanao, and Press Secretary.
He used to be a board member of the Southern Philippines Development Authority, and currently serves as a member of the Advisory Council of the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) (based in Tokyo, Japan), the Human Security Advocates, NEURON Comm group (affiliated with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Population Communication) and Madre de Amor Hospice Foundation (a hospice for terminally ill patients). He holds an AB Journalism degree from UP, two Master’s degrees and a PhD. He is married to Lourdes S. Adriano, a PhD economist from Cambridge University, with three sons (a PhD in Economics, an MD specializing in ophthalmology (vitreoretinal), and a lawyer with a Master’s of Law degree from the University of Melbourne).