Jenniffer Santos-Hernández

Jenniffer Santos Hernández is a Puerto Rican sociologist and associate research scientist at the Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware. She earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology, magna cum laude, from University of Puerto Rico – Mayagüez in 2004, followed by a master’s degree (2007) and a PhD (2013) in sociology from University of Delaware. During her graduate studies, Santos Hernández served as a graduate research assistant for the Disaster Research Center and as research associate for the Geographic Information Science and Technology Group and the Climate Change Science Institute of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Santos Hernández was a faculty member at University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, affiliated with Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, the oldest social science research institution in Puerto Rico, housed within the College of Social Sciences, and also with the Graduate School of Planning, where she developed the curriculum for a graduate certificate program in Planning for Disaster Risk Reduction—the first of its kind in the Caribbean region. Santos Hernández served as the founding chair of the graduate certificate program at UPR-Río Piedras for two years, before transferring her research to the Disaster Research Center in 2024.

Santos Hernández is the co-principal investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Coastlines and People – Rising Voices, Changing Coasts: The National Earth and Indigenous Science Large Scale Convergence Hub. Additionally, she is the co-Principal Investigator for the NSF Confronting Hazards, Impacts and Risks for a Resilient Planet Planning Grant, 'Understanding Risk Propagation of Landslide-Community Systems for Community-Centric Risk Assessment and Mitigation.'