Professor Jakob was awarded his PhD in Meteorology from the Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich in 2001. As Research and Senior Research Scientist for the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts from 1993 to 2001, he worked on the development and evaluation of parameterizations for clouds, convection and precipitation. From 2002 to 2007 he was Senior and Principal Research Scientist of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and since 2007 has been a professor at Monash University. He currently holds the Chair of Climate Modelling at Monash’s School of Mathematical Sciences and he is the current Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. Professor Jakob’s experience and current interests are in the development and evaluation of the hydrological cycle in global atmospheric models. Internationally, he is engaged in many scientific and collaborative activities. He is the current Co-chair of the World Climate Research Programme’s Modeling Advisory Council. He led the prestigious Working Group on Numerical Experimentation from 2008 to 2012 and was the first university-based researcher to be appointed in that position, in which he is coordinating research within WCRP on the evaluation and development of the representation of the energy and water cycles in global models. He was Chair of the World Climate Research Programme’s (WCRP) Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Modelling and Prediction Panel from 2007 to 2010. As recognition of his prominent position in the climate science field, Professor Jakob was a lead author for the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report (Working Group 1).