Nick van de Giesen is professor at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, where he holds the “Van Kuffeler” Chair of Water Resources Engineering. After a postdoctoral position with WARDA, Côte d’Ivoire, he was a Senior Researcher at the ZEF, University of Bonn. He received his PhD from Cornell University and his MSc from Wageningen University. He chairs the Delft|Global Initiative and is co-director of the Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory (www.tahmo.org).