Maureen Fordham is a professorial research associate at University College London, where she is the director of the Centre for Gender and Disaster at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction. She has been researching disasters since 1988 and is an expert on community-based disaster risk reduction and vulnerability analysis, focusing particularly on the inclusion of a range of marginalized social groups in disaster risk reduction. She was a founding member of the Gender and Disaster Network in 1997 and is the coordinator of its website and activities. She is a governmental advisor at all scales from local through national to the global United Nations level. She was closely involved in negotiations which led to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030. She has edited, and is on the editorial boards of, international disaster-related journals. She is also affiliated with Northumbria University in the United Kingdom, and Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand.