Ibrahim Hoteit is a professor of Earth Sciences and Engineering and affiliated with the Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences program at KAUST. He is currently leading the Virtual Red Sea Initiative, a joint initiative with Scripps Institution of Oceanography, MIT, NCAR and Plymouth Marine Laboratory, and serving as the director of the Climate Change Center and the Saudi Aramco Marine Environment Research Center at KAUST. Dr. Hoteit's research interests focus on the modeling of oceanic and atmospheric systems on supercomputers and the analysis of their circulation and variability, with specific interest in data assimilation and uncertainty quantification for large-scale systems. Dr. Hoteit co-authored more than 300 papers and was awarded the prestigious Kuwait Prize in Basic sciences. He is serving as associate editor of Plos One, Computational Geosciences, Mathematics of Climate and Weather Forecasting, and Atmospheric Science Letters. He is a member of the American and European Geophysical Unions, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and an elected member of the UNESCO Center of Pure and Applied Mathematics. Dr. Hoteit earned his M.S. (1998) and Ph.D. (2002) in applied mathematics from the University of Joseph Fourier, France.