Professor Mahbuba Nasreen is the Director and Co-founder of the Institute of Disaster Management and Vulnerability Studies (IDMVS), University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her career started as a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the same university in 1988. She has received Commonwealth Scholarship in 1991 for pursuing her PhD Degree in New Zealand, which further developed her professional career. Her dissertation topic Coping with Floods: the Experiences of Rural Women in Bangladesh (1995) was pioneering PhD research within South Asia and has been widely used in the areas of disaster and gender studies. After serving as Professor of Sociology from 2005-2012 she has been appointed as Director of IDMVS.

Dr. Nasreen is involved in research in the areas of theory, gender, disasters, environment, climate change, education, social inclusion, indigenous community, humanitarian issues and other areas of social development since the late 1980s. She is representing University of Dhaka as a member of the National Disaster Management Advisory Committee, Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief (MoDMR), Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh (GoB) since 2009.

Prof. Nasreen is continuously contributing to policy making in reducing disaster risks and other relevant areas of national and international drivers. She has participated and contributed in several national and global forums such as World Conference on Women, Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (GPDRR), Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (AMCDRR), the first ever World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) organized by the UN and relevant others. Dr. Nasreen has been honored with Mary Fran Myers Award, 2016, Gender and Disaster Network, Natural Hazards Center, Colorado University (Boulder), USA for her three-decade long contributions in disaster research. She is involved in collaborative research activities in home and abroad. She is leading the Gender and Disaster Network’s (GDN) Bangladesh country hub and is a Co-Investigator on the UCL-led Gender Responsive Resilience and Intersectionality in Policy and Practices (GRRIPP) in South Asia.