Bio
Jenniffer Marie Santos-Hernández is an assistant 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 co-lead for the city of San Juan in the NSF Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (NSF UREx), as the lead of the Helping Affected Communities Engage in Resilience (HACER) initiative, and as external evaluator of the Minority Scholars from Under-Represented Groups in Engineering and the Social Sciences (SURGE) Capacity in Disasters project. 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, which was a project that engaged undergraduate students and teachers in the development of lesson plans that introduced concepts related to climate change to K-3 curriculum.
Dr. Santos-Hernández is an interdisciplinary scholar who also offers courses 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.
