Omar D. Cardona
He holds a degree in Civil Engineering from the National University of Colombia, Manizales, has done graduate studies in risk assessment at Oxford Polytechnic, UK, and Colorado State University in Fort Collins, USA, and holds a Ph.D. in Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics from the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain. He is Associate Professor of the National University of Colombia in the Institute of Environmental Studies (IDEA). He is former President of the Colombian Association for Earthquake Engineering and former Director General of the National Directorate for Disaster Risk Management of Colombia. He is a consultant of the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, UNDP, UN-ISDR and other agencies of UN system. He has been the Representative of the Consortium ERN-AL (the developer of CAPRA platform), CEO of INGENIAR LTDA and Researcher of the International Center of Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) in Spain. He is a founder member of the Latin American Network of Social Studies on Disaster Prevention (LA RED). He is member of the IRDR Scientific Committee of ICSU, the Scientific Board of GEM, Coordinator Lead Author of IPCC SREX and Review Editor of IPCC AR5. He supervised 7 doctoral theses and 2 master theses. His publications are 15 books, 22 monographs, 22 chapters of book, 37 peer reviewed papers in indexed journals, 70 articles in proceedings of conferences and congresses. He has presented more than 330 lectures around world. In 2004 he was the winner of the UN Sasakawa Prize for Disaster Risk Reduction "in recognition of his outstanding research contributions to knowledge and innovative practices for vulnerability assessment and disaster risk reduction worldwide."