Katherine Hernandez is third-generation Chicana/Latina of Mexican and Guatemalan descent. Katherine is a Ph.D. candidate at the UCLA Institute of the Environment & Sustainability (IoES). Her interdisciplinary research bridges social-ecological systems (SES), narrative theory, and animal behavior to explore how human stories and cultural narratives shape the lives of wild animals—particularly in shared spaces and across time. Part of Katherine’s ongoing research involves bobcat movement in Albmarle County, Virginia, made possible with the collaboration of the Jesmer Lab at Virginia Tech and the Smithsonian. Her study investigates spatial relationships between bobcat behavior, local narratives and attitudes, policies, and other human systems.
Katherine is also contributing to a range of research projects on topics including biocultural vulnerability, the public life of P-22 and animal “celebrity,” and movement diversity. In 2024 she co-authored a paper on the lack of extinction risk assessments completed for artisan-used plant species in Colombia, published in Ecosystems & People (Hernandez et al., 2024).
She is a co-lead of the Environmental Humanities Reading Group (EHRG) and serves as a Teaching Assistant across multiple departments. A lifelong storyteller and lover of fiction—especially sci-fi, fantasy, and horror—Katherine integrates her passion for narrative into her ecological work.
As neurodiverse and invisibly disabled person, Katherine is committed to community-driven, conservation-applicable research that centers the voices and values of local communities. Her work is guided by the belief that “we cannot begin to understand the world until all the world is taking part.”
Outside of research, Katherine enjoys speculative fiction writing, indoor rock climbing, and tending to her indoor and native plant garden—where her beloved Monstera, named Stephanie Germanotta, is almost as tall as she is.
