Dr. Joannes Paulus T. Hernandez
Joannes Paulus T. Hernandez, DComm, MAN, RN, CHSE is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Stellar Life Support Technologies, a Research Fellow at the Advanced SpaceLife Research Institute (ASRI), and Associate Professor of Nursing at Helene Fuld College of Nursing in Harlem, New York.
He is a nurse educator, research scientist, and aerospace nursing pioneer working at the intersection of multisensory AI-driven simulation, human–robot interaction, and healthcare delivery in extreme environments.
At Stellar Life Support Technologies, which he founded in September 2025, Joannes leads a multidisciplinary team designing a CubeSat that integrates dosimetric, biological, and environmental subsystems to investigate the effects of radiation and microgravity on living systems. The company also develops virtual reality nursing simulations and electronic health record technology for health assessment of commercial spaceflight passengers, with a particular focus on aerospace nursing science and countermeasures across the entire spaceflight continuum.
Since March 2025, Joannes has served as Vice President of the Philippine Space Biosciences Society (PSBios), where he leads the SymbioSat Project and the RIZAL CubeSat Technology Program — efforts to test Philippine moss, melanized fungi, and lichens as radiation-shielding agents through protective symbiosis for sustainable space biospheres. In that role he organized and presented the inaugural Aerospace Nursing and Space Informatics: First Philippine Forum at Rizal Technological University in 2025 and delivered the SINAG: Sustainable Innovations for Nurturing Adaptable Growth in Filipino Space Habitats webinar for World Space Week 2025.
Since 2023, Joannes has been a Research Fellow at the Advanced SpaceLife Research Institute, a 501(c)(3) research organization based in Cape Canaveral dedicated to the study of human sexuality, reproduction, and life sciences in off-Earth environments. He is also a member of the Canadian Space Radiation Research Group via the Canadian Space Health Research Network (CSHRNet), where he contributes to consensus-building on radiation research strategy with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, and supports efforts that advance understanding of radiation risks for the Artemis Program and future human space exploration.
At Helene Fuld College of Nursing, Joannes joined as Adjunct Nursing Faculty for Nursing Informatics in August 2021 and was promoted to Associate Professor of Nursing in November 2022. Between April 2024 and November 2025, he served as Associate Dean of Simulation, where he oversaw curricular integration, evaluation, and creation of simulations and directed the design of a custom preeclampsia simulation for Parent–Child Health Nursing aligned with Tanner’s Clinical Judgment Model.
He led the development of a Qualtrics-XM–based At-Risk Student Classification Tool, co-chaired the Outcomes/Curriculum B Committee for the Generic BSN, and built a logistic regression model to predict first-time NCLEX-RN pass rates under the revised curriculum. He was recognized in 2024 with the College’s Provost Faculty Leadership Award — the first Filipino-American nursing faculty member at the associate professor rank to receive the honor in the history of Helene Fuld College of Nursing since 1945, for teaching excellence and pioneering faculty and student research and innovation in AI and robotic technologies in nursing education. Read Faculty Spotlight: Joannes Paulus Tolentino Hernandez in HFCN Magazine.
Joannes’s research interests encompass nursing simulation, infodemiology, neuroscience, and the integration of AI and humanoid robotics in healthcare. His paper Compassionate Care with Autonomous AI Humanoid Robots in Future Healthcare Delivery: A Multisensory Simulation of Next-Generation Models, published in Biomimetics in 2024, examines the potential of humanoid robots to autonomously replicate compassionate care through agent-based modeling that extends Tetsuya Tanioka’s TRETON framework and Martha Rogers’s nursing theory, drawing on neuromorphic computing and quantum-inspired concepts.
His earlier paper Network Diffusion and Technology Acceptance of A Nurse Chatbot for Chronic Disease Self-Management Support: A Theoretical Perspective, published in The Journal of Medical Investigation in 2019, was among the first to articulate a theoretical framework for AI-driven conversational agents in chronic care.
In January 2024, Joannes presented an analysis of cosmic radiation through data sonification for dark matter detection at the Henryk Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków. In November 2024, he was the only U.S. registered nurse to present on humanoid nurse robots for long-duration space missions at the Canadian Space Health Research Symposium in London, Ontario. He is the first internationally educated nurse accepted into the Master of Science in Aerospace Physiology program at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and the first Nurse Research Fellow at the Advanced SpaceLife Research Institute.
Between January and April 2025, he completed the NASA Proposal Writing and Evaluation Experience (NPWEE) Academy of NASA’s L’SPACE Program, administered through Arizona State University. Between April 2025 and March 2026, he continued with L’SPACE as Data Analyst and Computer Simulation Specialist for a NASA-funded project — the first Filipino-American U.S. registered nurse to serve as a team member on a winning proposal team, mainly composed of engineers, tasked with developing a sustainable food production system for the International Space Station.
On November 14, 2025, Joannes served as Subject Matter Expert Panelist and Discussant at the Multisensoriality of Science for Peace and Development Forum convened by the Royal Academy of Science International Trust (UN-affiliated) — the first Filipino-American U.S. registered nurse expert in translating scientific data into sounds and music for nursing research.
In March 2026, Joannes was profiled in a Student Spotlight feature in The Stratosphere, the newsletter of the Aerospace Physiology program at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, recognizing his interdisciplinary engagement as Associate Professor of Nursing, current student in the Aerospace Physiology program, and emerging contributor to astronaut health research — the first Filipino-American U.S. registered nurse featured in the Aerospace Physiology Program at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
On April 29, 2026, Joannes received the Aerospace Physiology Research Excellence Award at the 22nd Annual Graduate Education Awards of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio — the first Filipino-American and U.S. registered nurse to receive this recognition in the school’s history. The award was recognized in an April 2026 Student Spotlight feature in The Stratosphere.
Joannes earned his Doctor of Communication (DComm) in 2022 from the University of the Philippines Open University, with concentrations in infodemiology, health informatics, and human–robot interaction. His dissertation, COVID-19 Infodemic in the Twitterverse: Characterization of Misinformation Spread and Twitter Bot Activity by Critical Mass, Energy Decay, Entanglements, and Node Synchronization Using Multilayer and Spectral Graph Visualizations, Kuramoto Modeling, Sonification, and Wavefunction Simulation, develops a Python-based analytics pipeline that fuses communication theory with quantum-mechanics-inspired tools to characterize misinformation dynamics.
He earned a Master of Arts in Nursing in Adult Health Nursing in 2012 from the same institution, a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing in 2005 from Emilio Aguinaldo College, and a Bachelor’s degree in Human Biology in 2002 from De La Salle University – Dasmariñas.
He is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Aerospace Physiology at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. His earlier career took him from biology instructor at De La Salle University – Dasmariñas to over 11 years as Lecturer and Clinical Instructor at Lyceum-St. Cabrini School of Health Sciences in the Philippines, then to nearly eight years at the University of Ha’il in Saudi Arabia, where he served as Nurse Lecturer and Nursing Quality Unit Director for Skills Development.
After moving to the U.S., he served as a Registered Dialysis Nurse II at DaVita and as Nursing Lab and Simulation Coordinator at the Swedish Institute College of Health Sciences in Manhattan, where he redesigned and operationalized a state-of-the-art simulation lab following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions and was featured in the PIX11 Morning News segment Swedish Institute Trains Next Class of Nursing Heroes.
Joannes holds the Certified Healthcare Simulation Educator (CHSE) credential from the Society for Simulation in Healthcare and active Registered Nurse licensure in the Philippines, New York, Connecticut, and Florida. He is a member of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing — Chi Nu Chapter — and a recipient of the Vicente Teves Locsin, Jr. Research and Scholarship in Nursing Award in 2022 and the Edith Anderson Leadership Education Grant in 2021.
Visit his LinkedIn profile and his Academia.edu page. Follow him at PSBios Facebook and X.