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Professor Gretchen Kalonji, co-chair of ANSO-DRR, was awarded the Friendship Award of the Chinese Government

ANSO-DRR

20 10, 2021

On Sept. 30, Gretchen Kalonji co-chair of ANSO-DRR, and Dean of the Institute for Disaster Management and Reconstruction (IDMR), was awarded the China Friendship Award, in a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People. The Friendship Award is the highest award offered to foreigners by the Chinese government to recognize contributions to the economic and social development of China. The award was presented by Vice Premier Liu He, and Dean Kalonji was subsequently invited with the other award members to join an event hosted by Premiere Li Keqiang in the Hebei Hall, where he honored them with a speech and a group photo. Prof. Kalonji and the rest of the award winners were then invited to participate in the National Day banquet, in a ceremony marking the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China which attended by President Xi Jinping. 

(The friendship award Prof.Kalonji got)

Professor Gretchen Kalonji assumed the position of Dean of the Institute for Disaster Management and Reconstruction (IDMR) at Sichuan University in May 2016. She previously served as the Assistant Director General for Natural Sciences at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as Director of International Strategy Development for the 10-campus University of California system, as Kyocera Professor of Materials Science at the University of Washington, and as Associate and Assistant Professor of Materials Science at MIT. In 2019, she co-founded ANSO-DRR with Professor Cui Peng, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. ANSO-DRR brings together the wisdom of international scientists focusing on natural disaster risk reduction, including such topics as ecological and environmental protection, cooperative disaster reduction mechanisms, and sustainable development. ANSO-DRR also has a strong focus on higher education capacity development, personnel training, and building new models for international cooperation through which universities, research institutes and academies of science can jointly tackle common challenges, and further advance the implementation of the United Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Reduction 2015-2030 and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, particularly among countries on the Belt and Road. ANSO-DRR currently involves 30 partners in 17 countries.

Prof. Kalonji has been working closely with China for 22 years and has made remarkable contributions to the development of research and education in China. She was awarded the TIANFU Friendship Award in 2020. Prof. Kalonji has recently pioneered the new interdisciplinary field of “Integrated Disaster Sciences and Management”, an approach which integrates contributions from natural sciences and engineering, social sciences and disaster health sciences to address the pressing challenge of enhancing disaster resilience worldwide. In partnership with UNESCO, under the U-INSPIRE framework, she has worked with networks of young scholars from many countries in Asia, who collaborate across national boundaries on disaster research.

She also co-leads the Secretariate of the Alliance of Alliances on Research and Education on Water and Disasters (AoA), which is a flagship initiative of the High-Level Panel on Water and Disasters, which has active participation of Chinese partners.  Within Sichuan, Kalonji led the establishment of the Ministry of Education’s Youth Disaster Prevention and Reduction Education Base at Sichuan University, the creation of the Sichuan Province Emergency Management Department - Sichuan University new key laboratory on “Integrated Disaster Sciences and Management”, and a “Natural Disaster Emergency Management and Post-Disaster Reconstruction”, think tank, which she serves as the principal investigator. This think tank was successfully approved as one of the first 22 new-type think tanks in Sichuan province to provide consultation to the government.
 
Source:Gordon G. D. Zhou,Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment,Chinese Academy of Sciences

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