Kaveh Madani

Kaveh Madani was born in 1981 in Tehran,[10] Iran to the parents working in the water sector.[11] He did primary education in Tehran and received his BSc in Civil Engineering from University of Tabriz.[12] He has a MSc in Water Resources from Lund University[13] in Sweden and a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Davis.[14][15] He did his post-doctoral studies in Environmental Policy and Economics at the Water Science and Policy Center and the Department of Environmental Sciences of the University of California, Riverside.[15][16][17]

He is an Iranian citizen and has frequently denied the claims by the Iranian hardliners about having additional citizenships.[18][19][20][21]

Kaveh Madani is a Henry Hart Rice Senior Fellow at Yale University and a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London. He was an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida before joining Imperial College in 2013.

In 2017, his name appeared in the media, including Shargh,[22] as one of the candidates[23] with strong support from the Iranian environmental NGOs and activists[24] to become Iran's Minister of Energy after Hamid Chitchian in Hassan Rouhani's second presidency term. Madani denied this news later in an interview[24] with the Mehr News Agency.

He was appointed by Issa Kalantari as the Deputy for International Affairs, Innovation and Socio-cultural Engagement of Iran's Department of Environment in 2017.[5] From 2017 to 2018, he served as the Deputy Vice President of Iran in his position as the Deputy Head of Iran's Department of Environment and the Chief of Iran's Department of Environment's International Affairs and Conventions Center.[25][26][27] He was interrogated many times during his tenure in Iran and was arrested in February 2018.[28][29][30] In April 2018, he resigned[31] from his political post and revealed that he was kept under surveillance by the Iranian intelligence services and hardliners since his return to Iran.[32][33]

In Iran, he served as the Chair of the National Committee on International Climate Change Negotiations, Vice President of the National Committee of Sustainable Development, Member of the Supreme Council of Iran's House of Farmers, Member of Iran's Supreme Water Council, and Member of the Iran-Afghanistan Negotiations Workgroup on Water.[34][35] He led Iran's delegation in the 23rd United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP23)[36][37][38] and the 3rd Session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-3).[39]

He has received several awards for his research contributions, teaching innovations, and humanitarian activities such as the "New Faces of Civil Engineering" by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2012[12], the Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Young Scientists by the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in 2016 [40][41], the Walter L. Huber prize by ASCE in 2017, and the Hydrologic Sciences Early Career Award in 2019 from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) .[12][34][35][42]