Dr. Zafar Adeel is the Director of United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH). He also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Engineering at the McMaster University. Previously, he served as the Chair of UN-Water from January 2010 to February 2012. He has been part of the UNU since 1998 and holds a Master’s Degree from Iowa State University (1992) and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (1995). Before joining the UNU, he served as a Senior Engineer at GeoTrans Inc. (USA) for a number of years. He has experience in a range of water and environmental issues, including monitoring and control of water pollution, water management in dry areas, solutions to industrial environmental problems, modeling of environmental systems and environmental policy formulation. He has led the development of a network of scientists working in water-scarce countries, particularly those in Africa, Middle East and Asia and published several books during his editorial lead. He co-chaired the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment team that produced the global desertification synthesis in 2005. Dr. Adeel was also member of the editorial boards of Sustainability Science (Springer) and Global Environmental Change (Elsevier Science).