J. Nicolas Hernandez-Aguilera
J. Nicolas Hernandez-Aguilera
J. Nicolas Hernandez-Aguilera (Nico) is an interdisciplinary social scientist focused on community-based research in sustainable agriculture, climate change, and biodiversity conservation in the Global South.
His applied research connects better smallholders’ needs for climate action and conservation, articulating bottom-up and top-down approaches. He develops accessible and customized digital tools and games that scale ground data, facilitate smallholders’ access to climate services, and improve climate risk adaptation strategies. He has evaluated the impact of direct business models in coffee and modeled profitable agroecological cropping systems that incentivize forest, bird conservation, and farm-level climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Nico is an Associate Research Scientist at Yale School of the Environment. He is a former Columbia University Earth Institute Postdoc Research Fellow, and he received his Ph.D. in Applied Economics and Management from the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.