WHEN:
Tuesday, October 29th, 2019
12:30 PM

WHERE:
Room 521, Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

EVENT DESCRIPTION:
This event is hosted by MDes Risk & Resilience.
Pizza & refreshments will be provided.

Cynthia Caron, PhD. Associate Professor

Professor Cynthia Caron holds a PhD in Rural Sociology from Cornell University and a Masters of Forest Science from Yale University. She has worked and conducted research in South Asia for over 15 years primarily in India, Bhutan, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka and more recently in Rwanda and Ethiopia. Living in Sri Lanka at the time of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Professor Caron spent five years managing and implementing a variety of post-tsunami relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction projects. For the United Nations, she managed a joint monitoring system that kept track of shelter and shelter-site conditions in over 400 transitional shelter sites housing tsunami-displaced families. She was Rehabilitation and Resettlement Program Manager for Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund (ASB Germany) providing financial support, construction training, and engineering oversight to displaced communities so that they could construct new homes. In 2008, Professor Caron founded the Applied Research Unit (ARU) for the United Nations Office for Project Services providing clients in Sri Lanka’s humanitarian and donor community with project design and monitoring and evaluation services. She has worked with World Wildlife Fund-Bhutan, UNICEF, UNDP, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, CARE International, FAO, and the International Labor Organization (ILO). Most recently, she served as Land Tenure and Property Rights Specialist and Senior Research and Evaluation Manager on land rights programming with the Seattle-based non-profit, Landesa. In general, her research and evaluation expertise focuses on the mutually constitutive relationship between the state and society by specifically examining the cultural politics of gender, natural resource access and land tenure and property rights.

Ramón Borges-Méndez, PhD. Associate Professor

Ramón Borges-Méndez was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and has a professional career working in some 20 countries in Latin America and Asia, plus the United States and Puerto Rico. He holds a PhD and an MCP in Urban/City and Regional Planning from MIT. Prof. Borges-Méndez has held academic positions at UMASS-Boston, UMASS-Amherst, American University’s School of International Service, The Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and the University of Chile’s Public Policy Graduate Program.  He also has a broad career as a consultant on economic and social development for the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, The Economic Commission on Latin American and the Caribbean of the United Nations (ECLAC), The United Nations’ Department for Social and Economic Affairs, the Inter-American Development Bank, The Brookings Institution, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, the Government of Chile, and SEIU-1199 Health Care Workers, NYC.  Dr. Borges-Méndez’s work has been published in the Economic Development Quarterly, The Non-Profit Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, and CENTRO-Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. He is co-founder and Secretary of Fundación Bucarabón, Maricao, PR.