Hania Zlotnik was appointed Director of the Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations Secretariat, in February 2005 after working in the Population Division for 23 years. She is the tenth person to serve as Director of the Population Division and the first woman to do so.

During her long career at the Division, Ms. Zlotnik has worked in all the major areas of population research. In particular, she was Chief of the Mortality and Migration Section of the Division from 1993 to 1999 and she directed the Population Estimates and Projections Section from 1999 to 2003. She also served as Assistant Director from 2003 to 2005, overseeing work on fertility, mortality, and migration.

Before joining the Population Division, Ms. Zlotnik worked as Research Associate for the Committee on Population and Demography of the U.S. National Research Council. A Mexican citizen, Ms. Zlotnik studied mathematics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and holds a Ph.D. in Statistics and Demography from Princeton University.

Ms. Zlotnik's work has spanned the field of demography, covering the analysis of fertility, mortality, migration, and urbanization with especial emphasis on their quantitative aspects. She co-authored one of the United Nations best selling manuals, Indirect Techniques of Demographic Estimation, and also prepared A Step by Step Guide to the Estimation of Child Mortality. She drafted the United Nations Recommendations on Statistics of International Migration: Revision 1, and co-authored a book on International Migration Statistics: Guidelines for Improving Data Collection Systems published by the ILO. Her work has contributed to provide better estimates of international migration worldwide and to the improvement of statistics on international migration. In addition, as Director of the Population Division, Ms. Zlotnik was responsible for the substantive preparations of the High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development that the General Assembly conducted in 2006.

Ms. Zlotnik has edited or written numerous reports published by the United Nations, including studies of international migration and development, trends in international migration, female migration, population distribution and migration, population estimates and projections, population ageing, and levels and trends of urbanization. She has published over 35 articles in books or refereed journals and has collaborated in editing books or reports on varied subjects.

Ms. Zlotnik has also been an active member of several professional associations, serving as Board Member for the Population Association of America from 2001 to 2003 and as Vice-President of the International Union for the Study of Population (IUSSP) from 2001 to 2005.