 Hi everyone, my name is Christian Brito, I'm an assistant professor at the University of Geneva, where I have the pleasure to lead the education and knowledge component of the Geneva Water. In a few words, the Geneva Water is a centre from the University of Geneva. It could be called a university-based boundary organisation that focus on hydro-politics and on water as an instrument for peace and cooperation. We are fully convinced of the necessity to connect academic actors in the field of water cooperation and diplomacy and this is why we decided to be active, to support and to be involved in the coordination of the partnership. I think that such partnership is key to avoid possible overlaps but also to ensure that we identify possible synergies between the actors. For upcoming years, I hope that we will be able to further develop the education programme that we already started to develop with some colleagues and I hope that we will be able also to submit exciting research proposals and to get some research proposals to tackle the challenges related to water cooperation and diplomacy. Hello from IEC Delft Institute for Water Education. My name is Jennifer Serim and I am a senior lecturer in water governance and diplomacy. IEC Delft, located in the Netherlands, is the largest international graduate water education facility in the world. Our academic departments range from disciplines like hydrology and engineering to hydroinformatics, law and water governance. With some of the core partners of the university's partnership, we have long-standing relations especially with Oregon State universities who has been contributing to our water conflict management specialization here. Since 2015, we are also offering a joint master programme on water cooperation and diplomacy together with Oregon State University and the University of Peace in Costa Rica, who is also a co-partner of this network. Through the establishment of the university's partnership, we could intensify these existing partnerships but also build new ones. Currently, we are for example working with the University of Geneva in developing a massive open online course and we are contributing to the curriculum of the German Casa University in Almaty by offering specific models on water governance and cooperation. We also regularly invite partners of the network to our events like the annual Water and Peace seminar. Through this cooperation, the partnership enables us to connect knowledge of how water cooperation is done from around the world in which our academic debates with voices and perspectives from different regions and different disciplines learn from each other and advance the state of knowledge in this crucial area. Therefore, we hope that the scope and intensity of the network will grow. Stay connected. Good afternoon. My name is Diego Jara. I'm a legal officer at the IUCN Environmental Law Centre located in Bonn, Germany. For more than 20 years, IUCN has been working in the field of Transboundary Water Governance, Diplomacy and Cooperation in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. One of the main pillars of work of IUCN has been the promotion of dialogue among different stakeholders coming from different levels of governance and sectors of society including ministries of water, environment, foreign affairs, local authorities, civil society, NGOs and academia. For these dialogues to be effective, there is a strong need that stakeholders are actually skilled in the dialogues that they are going to hold. This is why IUCN has promoted a variety of methodologies for these capacities to be strengthened, including online courses, internships, exchanges of lessons and experiences between river basin organizations and others. In this sense, being part of this university partnership has a great benefit for IUCN and for the more than 14 Transboundary River Basin Organizations where IUCN is promoting cooperation, diplomacy and peace. Thank you very much. Hello, my name is Lei Xie and I'm from the Institute of Governance in Shandong University. I'm very pleased to meet you and I appreciate very much this opportunity to join the partnership meeting. We, as an institute, joined the network last August. Here at Shandong University, we are more research-based, I mean for the institute. I chair a major research program on water governance and we focus on the politics, policy arrangements to understand the sharing of river basins domestically and internationally. I have started working with colleagues from the network. We are discussing possibilities to organize regional and international events in order to promote capacity building and the managing of shared international rivers between China and Central Asia. Greetings from sunny Arizona. I'm Andrea Gerlach, a professor in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona located in the southwestern corner of the United States. We're excited to be one of the newest members of the university's partnership on water cooperation and diplomacy. I'm pleased to introduce you to some of the work of the Udall Center for Studies and Public Policy here at the University of Arizona as we look to find ways to work together through the partnership. Here at the Udall Center, we are an interdisciplinary research center whose mission is to facilitate, analyze, and provide evidence-based solutions to policy issues through research, education, and public service. From a research perspective, we have a 40-year history of examining patterns of conflict and cooperation over water resources along the U.S.-Mexico border. This work has evolved over the years to reflect more of a regional focus on the Americas. Over the past decade, we've been shifting to more comparative work to understand conflict and cooperation around shared resources. Some of this work has looked at governance and policy aspects of water security, global groundwater governance, and the role of science in transboundary water cooperation. Presently, a team at the Udall Center is leading a special issue in the journal Environmental Science and Policy on hydro diplomacy and a diverse set of river basins from around the world. In terms of our education mission, we collaborate with diverse networks of researchers working to strengthen networks and mentoring junior scholars and graduate students. We're particularly excited about the potential for student exchanges and mentoring efforts under the University's Partnership for Water Cooperation and Diplomacy. Good morning and warm welcome from Central Asia. My name is Barbara Janusz-Pawlietta. I'm working as a Vice-Rector for International Cooperation at the German-Kazakh University in Almaty, Deutsch-Kazakhische Universität. And we are very pleased and honored to be a core member of the University's Partnership for Water Cooperation and Diplomacy. Our core activity is master program in Integrated Water Resource Management, which we offer already for almost 10 years with the support of the German government, which is offered for the different civil servants coming from all countries of Central Asia and Afghanistan. The unique value of this program is to bring together civil servants, to bring together young experts and professionals to exchange the knowledge to learn from the new international experience, but also build trust, trust which is so much needed for peaceful cooperation in the transboundary water management. What I would like to stress is that through the partnership of the universities, we are having the opportunity to strengthen our mobility of academic staff, inviting the teachers from the global network to teach at our program, to engage in the common scientific programs, to do the common research on the region, but also on the global aspects of transboundary water management, and obviously exchange knowledge and build our capacities on the methodology of teaching and of science. I really would like to encourage all of you to become a member to our network, because the idea is to learn from each other for the peaceful transboundary cooperation in water. Thank you and see you in the network.