Isabelle Defourny is 51 years old and the mother of a 13-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son. She is a doctor trained in tropical medicine. Her career at MSF began in Yemen in 1999 with the French section after having been rejected by MSF-Belgium because she had no training in tropical medicine. Then she went to Eritrea, Burundi, Liberia and Darfur where she was able to gauge the extent of the working possibilities for the MSF teams. She came to headquarters in 2004 as deputy program officer, then program officer until 2011. From 2011 to 2015, she worked in Dakar as program director for ALIMA, of which she was one of the founding members. She was elected to the MSF-France board in 2013, which she left to take up the position of director of operations from September 2015 to March 2022.