Dr. Jenty Kirsch-Wood
UNDRR Alternate
Jenty Kirsch-Wood joined UNDRR in 2022 as the Head of Global Risk Analysis and Reporting. Previously she served as UNDP Deputy Resident Representative in Kyrgyzstan and advised Viet Nam and Nepal on climate change and disaster resilience issues.
She also served as the Disaster and Climate Change Policy Focal Point for UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She has nearly 20 years’ experience working with UN agencies and non-governmental organisations in Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya and Somalia.
Jenty holds a Master’s Degree from the London School of Economics and a Bachelor’s Degree from Harvard University.
Dr. Mariana Madruga de Brito
Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, UFZ-Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany
Tracking adaptation measures and socio-economic impacts of multi-hazards and using machine learning and NLP
Mariana Madruga de Brito is an interdisciplinary scientist working in the intersection of natural and social sciences. After obtaining an MSc in Engineering (2014), she pursued a PhD in Geography at the University of Bonn, investigating the socioeconomic vulnerability towards floods (2015-2018). From 2019 to 2023, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), where she pioneered innovative approaches for assessing drought and flood socioeconomic impacts using text as data. In 2023, she established the Computational Sociology for Extreme Events working group at the UFZ, focusing on the use of computational social sciences methods such as large language models and network analyses in multi-hazards risk research. During her career, she undertook research stays in Vigo, Copenhagen, Porto Alegre, Klagenfurt, Potsdam, and Amsterdam. Her current research focuses on knowledge synthesis using quantitative methods, long-term monitoring of climate impacts on society, analyses of human-water interactions, and investigating social inequalities.
Dr. Wim Thiery
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of Water and Climate
Will you live an unprecedented life?
Wim Thiery is a climate scientist focused on modelling extreme events in a changing climate. After obtaining MScs at KU Leuven in Philosophy (2008) and Terrestrial Ecosystems and Global Change (2011), he was an FWO PhD fellow investigating the interaction between climate and the African Great Lakes with a regional climate model (2011–2015). From 2015 to 2018, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at ETH Zurich, where he investigated the historical and future impacts of irrigation on climate extremes at the global scale. In 2017 (age 29), he was appointed as research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he established the BCLIMATE Group. With over 900 media contributions since 2014, he is one of Belgium’s leading climate science communicators. During his research, he undertook research exchanges to Montréal, Berlin, and Zurich, and conducted field campaigns to Uganda, Rwanda, and DR Congo to install automatic weather stations on Lake Kivu and Lake Victoria. Thiery is contributing author of the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land (2019) and the Sixth Assessment Report (2021). His expertise includes climate change, climate extremes, regional and global climate modelling, land-atmosphere interactions, land management, storm early warnings, energy meteorology, and global-scale climate impact modelling. In 2017, Forbes magazine elected him as a member of the “Forbes 30 under 30 Europe”, bringing together “the brightest young entrepreneurs, innovators and game changers in Europe”. In 2023, he received one of the Arne Richter Awards for Outstanding Early Career Scientists from the European Geosciences Union.