The following senior staff appointment was announced on 15 December 2016, by then Secretary-General-designate, António Guterres:
I intend to create the position of Senior Advisor on Policy, and to appoint Ms. Kyung-wha Kang of the Republic of Korea to this new role.
Ms. Kyung-wha Kang is currently the Chief of the Secretary-General-designate’s Transition Team. She has served as Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs since April 2013, and was Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights from January 2007 to March 2013.
Before entering the United Nations, Ms. Kang was Director General of International Organizations at the Republic of Korea’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade.  She served in her country’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations from September 2001 to July 2005, during which time she chaired the Commission on the Status of Women.
Prior to joining the Foreign Ministry in 1998, Ms. Kang assisted the Speaker of the National Assembly in parliamentary diplomacy.  Earlier in her career, she worked for the Korean Broadcasting System’s news bureau and international radio bureau, and lectured in universities both in her own country and in the United States.
Born in 1955, Ms. Kang is married and has three children. She graduated from Yonsei University with a Bachelor of Arts in political science and diplomacy.  She also has a Master of Arts in mass communication and a PhD in intercultural communication from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the United States.