Jenniffer M. Santos-Hernandez, MA

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Bio

Jenniffer Santos-Hernandez is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. In addition, Jenniffer is also the president of the EERI Student Chapter at the University of Delaware and a representative of the Student Leadership Council of the National Science Foundation. She entered the program after receiving a B.A. in Sociology at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPRM). As an undergraduate, she completed a certification in International Population and Development from the University of Michigan-Population Fellows Program that took her to Petén, Guatemala to work with a local NGO in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve. She also completed a certification in Applied Social Research from the University of Puerto Rico-Center for Applied Social Research (CISA); where she also worked for three years as a research assistant for several projects. Jenniffer joined the DRC on August, 2004. In 2007, Santos-Hernández completed her master's thesis focused on Development, Vulnerability and Disasters in Puerto Rico.

Her interests include: demography, risk communication, political sociology, race, class and gender, Latino/a sociology, development, social change, sociological theory, environmental justice and GIS. As part of her work at DRC, she collaborates as a graduate research assistant on the DRC-End-User Integration project and the Puerto Rico Student Led Test Bed, which are part of the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere project (CASA) and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Currently she is the lead graduate student of an interdisciplinary research effort focusing on vulnerability and resilience in flood prone areas of Puerto Rico. As part of that project she is also developing the Puerto Rico Disaster Decision Support Tool. During her time at DRC, she also served as a graduate student for the project Population Composition, Geographic Distribution, and Natural Hazards: Vulnerability in the Coastal Regions of Puerto Rico which was funded by the NOAA's Sea Grant College Program.