Ana Cristina Thorlund joined UNISDR in 2005. She is now working at the UNISDR’s Global Education and Training Institute in South Korea. Before this assignment, she had led the Secretariat of the International Recovery Platform in Kobe, Japan, and served in UNISDR for the parliamentarians and gender initiatives in Geneva. In this capacity, she has supported the engagement of members of parliament from Asia, African Europ,e and Latin America in disaster risk reduction and supported legislative efforts for the development of the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management law of 2013 for EAC and the Latin American Parliament for the Protocol on Disaster Risk Management. Making disaster risk reduction gender-sensitive has been another area of her work, in which she contributed to the engagement of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in disaster risk reduction and climate change. Ana Cristina holds a master of Science from the University of Geneva and a postgraduate certificate for the assessment and management of geological and climate-related risk. Originally from Costa Rica, she is fluent in English, French, and Spanish.