B. Piedad Urdinola Contreras (Colombia)

Co-chair of the UN Committee of Experts on Environmental-Economic Accounting and General Director of the National Administrative Department of Statistics 

Ms. Urdinola is the General Director of Colombia’s National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE). She is an economist with a Master’s degree in Economics from the University of Los Andes and a Ph.D. in Demography and Population Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Before joining DANE, she worked as a researcher at Fedesarrollo, where she led Colombia’s first longitudinal household survey, the 2004–2005 Social Survey. She also served as Director of the Andean Demographic and Epidemiologic Observatory (ODEAN) and co-founded the Latin American Human Mortality Database, which she also co-directed. For 16 years, she was an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at the National University of Colombia. 

Throughout her career, Ms. Urdinola has received several prestigious research fellowships and has been a visiting scholar at both Harvard and Stanford Universities. Her work has contributed significantly to global discussions on population, development, and environmental sustainability.