Bio
Jenniffer Marie Santos-Hernández is a research professor in sociology of disasters for Centro de Investigaciones Sociales (CIS-Center for Social Research). Established in 1945, CIS is the oldest social science research center in Puerto Rico, and part of the College of Social Sciences at University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. Dr. Santos-Hernández currently serves as principal investigator of the project Risk Communication in Concurrent Disasters, and as the lead of the Helping Affected Communities Engage in Resilience (HACER) initiative.
Santos-Hernández 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 is an alumna of 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. Her dissertation examined issues of development and policy transfers, social vulnerability to disasters, and the increasing "rationalization" of emergency management in Puerto Rico.
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.
Recently completed research projects include the Community Based Climate Change Adaptation Plan for the Municipality of Dorado, and the Puerto Rico Climate Change Education Program, the NSF Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (NSF UREx), and the Minority Scholars from Under-Represented Groups in Engineering and the Social Sciences (SURGE) Capacity in Disasters project.
Her interests include: population dynamics, disasters, climate change adaptation, emergency management, risk communication, collective behavior, race and ethnicity, stratification, development, environmental sociology, social movements, computational social science, and geographic information science.
