Campus Life

Secretary-general of Norwegian Refugee Council to speak March 12

Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, will speak March 12 at the Lewis Katz Building on Penn State's University Park campus as a guest of the Center for Security Research and Education. Credit: Penn State / Penn StateCreative Commons

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Center for Security Research and Education (CSRE) will host Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, for a talk at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 12, in the Sutliff Auditorium of the Lewis Katz Building on Penn State's University Park campus. 

Egeland's talk, "Protecting refugees in an age of global insecurity," is free and open to the public. No registration is required.

Egeland has been the secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council since August 2013. In 2015 he was appointed as special adviser to the United Nations special envoy for Syria. Within this position he chaired the humanitarian task force responsible for the safety and protection of Syrian civilians. He stepped down from this role in December 2018.

From 2011 to 2013 Egeland served as the European director at Human Rights Watch. He was appointed special adviser to the U.N. secretary-general for conflict prevention and resolution from 2006 and 2008. Prior to that, Egeland was U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator from 2003 to 2006. In that role he helped reform the global humanitarian response system and organized the international response to the Asian tsunami, and crises from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Lebanon.

In 2006, Time magazine named Egeland one of the “100 people who shape our world.”

CSRE reflects Penn State’s commitment to focusing the full range of interdisciplinary academic endeavor on the threats facing our world today.

The center has two primary focus areas. First, because security challenges consistently have social, scientific and technological dimensions, CSRE brings scholars from diverse disciplines together to pursue holistic, interdisciplinary research and solutions. Second, because public understanding enhances security, CSRE works with Penn State faculty and outside experts to educate policymakers, the media, the public, and Penn State students on the critical security issues of the day.

Last Updated February 27, 2019

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