Dr. Kristi Koenig, who is co-director of emergency medical services at the UC Irvine School of Medicine, travels the world sharing her expertise in disaster medicine, public health preparedness and emergency medical services. She has delivered more than 200 lectures in more than a dozen countries to help advance emergency medical care. In February 2006, she traveled to Mumbai, India, to train doctors and emergency responders for the possibility of a terrorist attack. Five months later, Mumbai suffered a wave of train bombings, which killed more than 200 people and injured hundreds more.
"There was a sense of surrealism and shock," she said. "How can something like this happen when we were just there?"
The mock terrorism drills and disaster training were the first of their kind in the region. "It's hard to measure the impact we had, but we were glad we went," she said.