Prof.Dr. Pierluigi Claps has been a full professor of water engineering at the Polytechnic University of Turin since 2000. He earned an M.Sc. degree in civil engineering, with honors, in 1986 and a Ph.D. in hydrology from the University of Naples in 1990. He is the author and co-author of more than 100 papers, mainly related to statistics and watershed hydrology topics, published in referenced journals and in proceedings of national and international conferences. From 1990 to 2005, he was involved in the activities of the CNR-GNDCI (Italian Group for Prevention of Hydro-Geologic Disasters), working on topics related to flood risk estimation at a regional scale. Within GNDCI, in 2001, he was in charge of the research unit 1.54 at the Polytechnic University of Turin and in 1999, he became a member of the scientific committee, providing support to the coordination of Line #1 research. His research interests include regional statistical analysis of extreme rainfalls and floods; assessment of extreme thunderstorm hazard over large areas; radar and remote sensing applications for the assessment of the spatial distribution of extreme rainfall; parsimonious statistical methods for the representation of hydrological processes; climate change effects assessment in mountain regions; the effect of climatic factors on the mechanisms of flood formation; methods for water resources assessment at the regional scale; and regional analysis of flow duration curves.