About this speaker
Dr. Bijan Khazai is the Chief Executive Officer of Hotel Resilient, the world’s only scientific benchmarking and certification body for disaster risk management and climate change adaptation of hotels and resorts. Dr. Khazai is an expert in catastrophe risk assessment and has more than 20 years of experience in risk modelling and foresight methods in disaster risk management. He has led many international research and consulting projects on behalf of the organizations such as the UN, the World Bank as well as various government agencies. In 2016, Dr. Khazai led an international consortium of universities and private sector partners to develop the only international standard on multi-hazard disaster risk management and climate change adaptation for hotels and resorts as part of the Hotel Resilient Initiative of the Global Initiative on Disaster Risk Management (GIDRM). This initiative ultimately gave birth to Hotel Resilient (hotelresilient.org) as an independent organization and certification body, which has been intensively involved in developing Covid-19 solutions for the hospitality sector since the start of the pandemic in late February. Dr. Khazai holds Masters and Doctoral degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.