J. Nicolas Hernandez-Aguilera

Dr. J. Nicolas Hernandez-Aguilera is an Associate Research Scientist and Lecturer at Yale School of the Environment. His research contributes to expanding analysis and tools for community sensing, climate services, and sustainable food systems with a particular emphasis on rural communities in the Global South. As an applied and interdisciplinary researcher, he generated frameworks and models to scale local knowledge and smallholders’ perceptions, leading to ground-based policies and instruments for climate risk management, alternative business models, land management practices, and biodiversity conservation in tropical crops. His work has been published in Nature Sustainability, Ecological Economics, Business Strategies, and the Environment, and Games, among others. Dr. Hernandez-Aguilera teaches the course Food Systems and Climate Services during the fall semester.

Prior to joining the Yale Faculty, he worked as a Columbia Climate School Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Financial Instruments team and the Columbia World Projects. His Ph.D. is from Cornell University, where he modeled profitable agroecological coffee systems to incentivize product quality recognition and bird and forest conservation. He is a J. William Fulbright Scholar recipient through which he advanced his Master in Public Policy at the University of Pittsburgh with an emphasis on research and the environment in Latin America. Before beginning his career as an applied economist and interdisciplinary social scientist, he worked at the Central Bank of Colombia modeling cash and macro demand variables using machine learning and neural networks. Originally from Colombia, South America, he enjoys bridging deep rurality and top academia, facilitating experiential learning, mutual growth, and community-based research between scholars, students, practitioners, and smallholders.