 I'm Abdi Mehfar from Iran. I was one of the PhD fellows of the University of Twente and IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. I graduated last week. I decided to study and have a PhD degree in the Netherlands especially. I found IHE and the University of Twente a good place to, you know, to pursue my education in the fields of coastal engineering. Well, I did my master's also in coastal engineering. So one of the reasons that really motivated me to do a PhD was that I've seen a lot of, you know, uncertainties in terms of the environmental aspects and, you know, climate change impacts in the environment. So, and I really wanted to, you know, know more about these kind of issues that, well, have not been really studied in the in the past. So it was just a nice idea from my supervisor if we can have a kind of different, you know, study on something that has not been really studied. It was a few years ago that I found IHE as one of the credible institutes for water education in the world and in fact it is the largest educational center for water education. So when I came to the Netherlands, well, I found that, you know, Netherlands is a good platform for studying in coastal engineering. I did my master's in IHE and then I decided also to do my PhD in IHE and at the same time the University of Twente. My PhD is basically about quantifying climate change-driven environmental losses in the coastal area and for that I developed a framework to quantify the environmental damages due to climate change impacts in coastal areas of developing countries. So it's basically the story was that first I developed a framework which is grounded on three different elements. One, valuation studies, economic valuation of coastal ecosystems and then also a participatory approach and a novel scenario-based approach in terms of how we can quantify or estimate the climate change impacts and particularly relative sea level rise induced inundation and erosion in coastal areas of developing countries. So and then I tried to quantify the monetary damages for the long time span for the next hundred years of the wetlands ecosystem services and how they can be affected by inundation and erosion due to relative sea level rise and applied my framework in three different cases. Studies of developing countries Indonesia, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were the three selected countries that I worked on and I applied my framework to quantify damages to the coastal environment due to sea level rise. I really enjoyed over the last four years when I was in academia and in the universities working with different colleagues working with some of the students in master degree and it was very nice opportunity for me and that actually motivated me to still you know be in academia and doing research and you know further expand my actually opportunities if I can work in the same environment and working with different people collaborating on different research projects and also you know raising increasing the chances to to know more about what I what I have done in my field of interest which is basically climate change impact assessments in coastal areas so that is my plan to do research and be in academia. There are always advises and suggestions for people who really are willing to start PhD position it's very important if you know what you want to study to know how you are going to start these five years journey in your life and interest in the topic is the most important thing that I would say and I believe that if people are who are willing to do a PhD if they have interest on the topic and they have enough you know you know motivation to start these four years project or if it is a project or if it's just an idea they just write you know their proposals they just develop their ideas and start looking for what they want to get and that is the main thing in doing a PhD just to keep going and have the hope to actually achieve what they want to get and then that really encourage people also to even further continue and stay in the academia for further research for developing their knowledge and to stay be updated about the latest you know issues in their area of interest and their research