David McLachlan-Karr Regional Director of UN Development Coordination Office, Asia-Pacific, Bangkok, Thailand David McLachlan-Karr is a senior international civil servant with thirty years’ work experience with the United Nations in the political, humanitarian and developmental fields. Prior to joining the UN on secondment from the Australian Government in 1993, David was an Australian diplomat (1984-1993) serving in Mexico (Third Secretary), the Republic of Korea (Second Secretary) and Iran (First Secretary/Deputy Head of Mission). Prior to his current role as Regional Director (from February 2022), David was Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General at MONUSCO and the Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2019 - 2022. From 2004 – 2019, Mr. McLachlan-Karr held assignments as UNDP Resident Representative and UN Resident Coordinator in Venezuela (2004-09), Papua New Guinea (2009-13) and Sierra Leone (2013-15) and Jordan (2016). In 2016-17, David was on secondment from the United Nations to the World Economic Forum in Geneva, where he held the position of Senior Adviser on Public-Private Partnerships. In 2017, he was appointed as Deputy Special Representative, UNDP Resident Representative & UN Resident Coordinator with UNIOGBIS in Guinea-Bissau. Prior to his assignments as Resident Representative, Mr. McLachlan-Karr worked in the UN Secretariat in New York in the emergency operations field of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and was deployed on extended field missions to complex emergencies in Somalia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, Kosovo, Sudan (Darfur) and Iraq. Mr. McLachlan-Karr holds a Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and a Bachelor’s degree in Government and Law from the University of Queensland, Australia. He was awarded a University Medal for academic achievement on graduation in 1984. David works in English, French and Spanish and has working fluency in Thai and Chinese.