Bio
Jenniffer Santos Hernández is an assistant research professor for Centro de Investigaciones Sociales (CIS-Center for Social Research) and interim director of Revista de Ciencias Sociales (RCS-Social Sciences Journal) at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. Dr. Santos-Hernández is an interdisciplinary scholar who also offers courses in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, in the Department of Environmental Sciences, and in the Graduate School of Planning at UPR-Río Piedras. She holds a B.A. Magna Cum Laude in Sociology from the University of Puerto Rico, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Delaware, and several certifications. Santos Hernández' dissertation research examined issues of development and policy transfers, social vulnerability to disasters, and the increasing "rationalization" of emergency management in Puerto Rico.
As an undergraduate, she completed a certification in International Population and Development from the Population Fellows Program at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and a certification in Applied Social Research from the University of Puerto Rico.
As a graduate student, she worked for the Disaster Research Center (DRC), the oldest and one of the leading research centers in the world devoted to research in the social aspects of disasters. While there, she contributed to several projects, including the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center on 'Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere', and the project 'Population Composition, Geographic Distribution, and Natural Hazards: Vulnerability in the Coastal Regions of Puerto Rico' funded by NOAA's Sea Grant Program. Dr. Santos also worked as a research associate in population dynamics, climate change, and disasters for the Climate Change Science Institute and for the Geographic Information Science and Technology Group in the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. ORNL is a world-class research facility and the largest science and energy national laboratory in the U.S. Department of Energy system. At ORNL she conducted basic science research focused on climate change and population displacement scenarios in Bangladesh and the Sahel region.
Her interests include: population dynamics, disasters, climate change adaptation, emergency management, risk communication, collective behavior, race and ethnicity, stratification, development, environmental sociology, computational social science and geographic information science.
