Feride Acar (Turkey)

Feride Acar has been a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) since 1997 and served as its rapporteur in 1999/2000. She is Professor of Political Sociology at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Bryn Mawr College, USA.

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Maria Angeles Arenas Ferriz (Cuba/Spain)

Maria Angeles Arenas Ferriz is a development management specialist, specialized in disaster reduction, gender and development, rural development and environmental protection. She works as a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme in the area of support development of the UNDP Regional Strategy for Disaster Reduction in Central America. She has worked as a consultant for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean on the elaboration of methodological tools to include gender scope in ECLAC Assessment Damage Valoration Disaster Socio-economical Impact. She has worked extensively on the estimation of earthquakes' impact on women who lost their homes. She is currently a candidate PhD in Anthropology at the University Complutense of Madrid, Spain.

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Sengül Akçar (Turkey)

Sengül Akçar is the Executive Director and Board Member of the Foundation for the Support of Women's Work, Member of the Huairou Commission, and Ashoka fellow. She has worked extensively on women's issues and has attended several national, regional and international meetings on issues such as gender, human settlements, governance and poverty eradication. She is a civil engineer and holds an MA in Public Administration from the Bosphorus University, Turkey.

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Madhavi Malalgoda Ariyabandu (Sri Lanka)

Madhavi Malalgoda Ariyabandu is the Programme Manager, Disaster Mitigation, Intermediate Technology Development Group in South Asia (ITDG) based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She has extensive knowledge on disaster and development issues and wide experience and understanding on gender issues. She was the coordinator of the South Asia Regional network on disaster mitigation, "Duryog Nivaran" from 1994 to 1999. She is currently working on a manual on gender sensitive disaster management. She holds a Master of Science in Agricultural Economics from the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich/U.K. and Master of Science in Agronomy, Faculty of Agriculture, from the Peoples Friendship University, Moscow, U.S.S.R.

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Majhabeen Chowdhury (Bangladesh)

Majhabeen Chowdhury works as manager of the disaster mitigation programme of the Intermediary Technology Development Group (ITDG), Bangladesh. She develops community based projects in Bangladesh and has recently coordinated a comprehensive livelihoods context study on disaster affected communities for ITDG. She is specialized in gender and human development, non-governmental development organizations and development, agrarian sociology and disaster management. She has written several papers on disasters and poverty. She holds an MA in Rural Sociology: Agriculture and Rural Development from the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), the Netherlands.

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Corazon Alma De Leon (Philippines)

Corazon Alma de Leon is the Former Chair of the Civil Service Commission and Former Chair of the Career Executive Service Board. She has extensive work experience at the Governmental level in the Philippines, having held the posts of, inter alia, Under-secretary in the Department of Social Welfare and Development, Acting Director in Social Development Affairs in the Office of the Prime Minister, Social Welfare Specialist and Acting Assistant Director, in the Bureau of Family Welfare of the Department of Social Welfare. She is also Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees in the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC), Bangkok, Thailand, and chairs the Executive Council of the Eastern Regional Organization of Public Administration (EROPA). She has attended several international meetings and conferences on governance and public administration. She is currently a PhD candidate in Public Administration, at the National College of Public Administration and Governance, University of the Philippines.

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Elaine Enarson (United States)

Elaine Enarson is an independent scholar currently teaching sociology and women's studies in the Denver, Colorado area. Elaine Enarson is the author of "Woods-Working Women: Sexual Integration in the U.S. Forest Service" and co-editor of the international reader "The Gendered Terrain of Disaster: Through Women's Eyes". Based on original research on Hurricane Andrew in Florida, the Red River Valley flood in the US and Canada, and the Gujarat, India earthquake, she has published articles on women's work in disasters and post-disaster political organizing, women's housing and evacuation experiences, disaster quilting, violence against women, race and class issues facing women in disasters, and the uses of feminist theory for disaster sociology. She is a founding member of the Gender and Disaster Network, lead course developer for a new FEMA course on social vulnerability, and principal investigator of an action research project conducting vulnerability and capacity research with low-income women's groups in the Caribbean. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oregon, USA, in 1981.

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Maureen Fordham (United Kingdom)

Maureen Fordham has been researching and teaching about hazards and disasters since 1988. She has carried out empirical research in Britain, mainland Europe and India. This work includes comparative studies of the attitudes and needs of local people and experts regarding hazard mitigation - both structural (flood embankments, relief channels, earthquake-tolerant buildings, etc) and non-structural (early warning schemes, emergency planning, etc) - and disaster management generally. Since recognizing in the early 1990s a lack of gender analyses in hazard and disaster research she has focussed particularly on this area, incorporating this into a general vulnerability/capacity approach. She has also been directly involved in the environmental management of various sites of conservation value in England.

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Angus Graham (South Africa)

Angus Graham works as a specialist in agriculture particularly focusing on humanitarian emergencies and gender. He has been working as international consultant on projects, inter alia, for the Food and Agricultural Organization, the World Food Programme, InterAmerican Development Bank and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. He has been working extensively on relief programme management and operations as well as in disaster mitigation and has wide work experience in developing countries including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Belize, Fiji, Caribbean, Botswana, Liberia and Zimbabwe. He earned his PhD in Agriculture from the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

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Shubh K. Kumar-Range (India)

Shub K. Kumar Range has a long experience in policy and programme design for integrating gender issues in equity, food security and sustainable economic development. She is specialized in inter-sectoral development strategies, evaluation of programmes and policies, and the integration of gender issues in disaster mitigation and recovery. She has worked extensively with a wide range of international organizations, donors and foundations, including the World Wide Fund for Nature, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the United National Development Programme, the International Food Policy Research Institute, GTZ, the Food and Agricultural Organization and CARE-International. Her recent work includes the writing up of a state-of-the-art paper on "Gender Issues in Disaster Mitigation and Recovery", for the InterAmerican Development Bank. She earned her PhD in Agricultural Economics and International Nutrition from Cornell University in 1977.

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Armine Mikayelyan (Armenia)

Armine Mikayelan heads the Seismic Knowledge Dissemination Branch of the National Survey for Seismic Protection and is President of the NGO Women for Development. She is member of various organizations including the Association of Women with University Education, the United Nations Development Programme Armenia network on gender and the Florida International University Gender and Disaster Network. She has worked extensively in the implementation of earthquake mitigation projects. She holds a PhD in Geological Mineral Sciences from the Academy of Sciences of Armenia.

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Nora Sequeira Munoz (Costa Rica)

Nora Sequeira Munoz works as an independent consultant. The last five years she has been working in a training programme implemented by the Network for Social Studies in Disaster Prevention in Latin America (LA RED). She has participated in the concept and design of training methodologies and materials for local levels, in community based disaster risk management. She has worked in the organization and implementation of subregional and national disasters risk management training workshops in Peru, Mexico, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Panama. She has worked as a consultant to the InterAmerican Development Bank in preparation of a comparative study on gender perspectives in disaster reduction, in the context of the reconstruction and transformation of Central America following Hurricane Mitch. She holds a MSc. in Central American History from the University of Costa Rica.

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Lynn Orstad (Canada)

Lynn Orstad currently works as Instructor of the Emergency Management Division at the Justice Institute of British Columbia in New Westminster, Canada. She is specialized in training concerning emergencies and has been involved in disaster/emergency management for over twenty-five years. She has done relief work for communities that have been struck by tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. In 1992 she worked in Florida in various areas of relief including business recovery, following Hurricane Andrew Mitch. In 1993 she was seconded by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to provide humanitarian relief aid to refugees fleeing from Bosnia and was sent by the Federal Government to do rapid assessment of women and children who had been victim of rape and torture in Bosnia and to explore potential aid programmes to assist them. In 1994 she was seconded by the International Red Cross to provide humanitarian aid relief to over 350,000 refugees in Rwanda and Tanzania where she worked in close contact with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the United Nations Children Fund.

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Samia Galal Saad (Egypt)

Samia Galal Saad has wide work experience at the national and international level with Governments, the private sector and the United Nations agencies. She has written extensively on water conservation and industrial waste issues, including conference proceedings on "awareness and training of women in environment". She attended several Training for Trainers Programmes on Environmental Impact Assessment, Integration of Public Health Dimension in Environmental Impact Assessment, Hazardous Waste Management, Industrial Risk Assessment, Promoting the Role of Community in Natural Resources Conservation and Environmental Pollution Prevention, Women's Participation in Sustainable Development through their Role in Environmental Conservation. She has conducted and organized several training programmes for integrating gender and environmental dimensions in the policy and programme evaluation for different UN and national governmental agencies personnel. She is a writer for children and women on simplified environmental education and actively participated in several TV and radio programmes for mass media environmental awareness. She has been awarded several prizes for her work, including the Rolex prize, the National Egyptian Academy of Science and Technology for Environmental Research prize and the academic prize of Alexandria University for Public Health Engineering Research. She is Technical Consultant to the Minister of State for Environmental Affairs in Egypt working, inter alia, on the integration of the gender dimension in the Ministry's projects. She earned her a PhD in Civil Engineering (Sanitary Engineering) from North Carolina State University, USA, in 1973.

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