Valentijn Pauwels graduated as an Agricultural Engineer from Ghent University, Belgium, in 1994.  He then pursued a PhD. at Princeton University, which was awarded in 1999 for a dissertation focusing on modelling hydrologic processes at high latitudes.  He was then awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Belgian Foundation for Scientific Research, which he undertook at Ghent University, where he became a Lecturer in 2005 and a Senior Lecturer in 2010.  At Ghent University, he developed projects on flood management and forecasting.  In 2012 he moved to Monash University, where he is currently an Associate Professor.  In 2013 he won an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.  At Monash, he has been developing projects on flood management and forecasting, and very recently as well on the link between water management and economy through water market modelling.