Ken Irvine is Professor of Aquatic Ecosystems IHE Delft Institute of Water Education in the Netherlands. Ken has worked on a range of lakes and catchments in Europe and Africa, gaining broad experience of the global challenges facing water and habitat quality. He heads up the Aquatic Ecosystems Group whose research is mainly on the biogeochemical processes, ecological assessment and capacity development within African wetlands. This necessarily requires a social-ecological perspective for the understanding and management of wetlands. The Aquatic Ecosystems Chair Group are an invited observer to the Ramsar Scientific and Technical Review Panel, and were on the editorial team in producing The Wetland Book (Springer), which will be major source of information on global wetlands.

He has previously worked at the University of East Anglia, the UK Nature Conservancy Council, before moving to study ecosystem structure of Lake Malawi in Africa. In 1994 he moved to Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and spent a decade and a half grabbling with the intricacies of policy and ecology to support the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive. His alter ego continued to work on the African Great Lakes of Malawi and Tanganyika, and the ecology of the Makgadikgadi salt pans of Botswana.

Other recent outreach work includes working on capacity development within the Danube basin, Integrated Water Resource Management in India and S.E. Asia, and development of an Integrated Managment Plan for the Lower Mara, Tanzania. Through his work at IHE, he continues to learn about the complexities and wicked problems of sustainable use of water and ecosystems. This has led to a collaboration with colleagues involved in citizen science and a new project in Women and Water for Change in Communities in Tanzania, Zambia and Uganda.