Civil Engineer (1999) and M.Sc. in Structural Engineering (2001) by the University of Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. Doctor in Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics (2006) by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. She was linked during the year 2001 to the Colombian Association for Earthquake Engineering (AIS) as an engineer in charge of the development of field guidelines and of forms for post-earthquake damage evaluation. During her Doctorate studies (2001-2006), She was awarded with a grant by the ProVention Consortium in the frame of the programme “Applied Research Grants for Disaster Risk Reduction” to developed the project “Expert System for Post-Earthquake Building Damage Evaluation and Massive Risk Occupancy Decision-Making” (2003). The work was selected to be presented in the “Global Symposium for Hazard Risk Reduction” at the World Bank headquarters in Washington DC, in July 2004.

She worked from 2006 to 2008 in the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as a PhD Research Fellow in the field of the Disaster Risk Management. In this position, she was in charge of the design, promotion and review of works related to technical cooperation in different countries of the Latin-American and Caribbean region. In 2008 She was awarded with the Beatriu de Pinós post-doctoral grant of the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants of the Generalitat de Catalunya (AGAUR), Spain (2008-2010) and She started to work as a researcher at the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE). She currently works in various research lines related to integrated disaster risk assessment and risk management in which She published various articles. She is also Adjunct Professor (Profesor Asociado) at UPC from 2009. Her teaching activity is in the field of Structural Dynamics and Seismic Risk Evaluation in the official Master Program in Civil Engineering of the UPC.

Her main research lines are: the holistic evaluation of the disaster risk, the habitability evaluation of buildings affected by earthquakes, the evaluation of the disaster risk management performance, the disaster risk management evaluation from a macro-economic perspective, the Hybrid Loss Exceedence Curve (HLEC) for disaster risk evaluation, the probabilistic cost-benefit analysis for seismic risk mitigation measures, the probabilistic assessment of seismic risk in terms of lost economic production due to premature loss of lives, and the risk and vulnerability analysis for hurricane risk.

She has supervised 6 Doctoral Theses already finished in these fields. She is an author of more than 20 papers in indexed scientific journals, of several chapters in books, monographs and communications in international conferences.