Wim Thiery is a climate scientist focused on modelling extreme events in a changing climate. After obtaining MScs at KU Leuven in Philosophy (2008) and Terrestrial Ecosystems and Global Change (2011), he was an FWO PhD fellow investigating the interaction between climate and the African Great Lakes with a regional climate model (2011–2015). From 2015 to 2018, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at ETH Zurich, where he investigated the historical and future impacts of irrigation on climate extremes at the global scale. In 2017 (age 29), he was appointed as research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he established the BCLIMATE Group. With over 900 media contributions since 2014, he is one of Belgium's leading climate science communicators. During his research, he undertook research exchanges to Montréal, Berlin, and Zurich, and conducted field campaigns to Uganda, Rwanda, and DR Congo to install automatic weather stations on Lake Kivu and Lake Victoria. Thiery is contributing author of the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land (2019) and the Sixth Assessment Report (2021). His expertise includes climate change, climate extremes, regional and global climate modelling, land-atmosphere interactions, land management, storm early warnings, energy meteorology, and global-scale climate impact modelling. In 2017, Forbes magazine elected him as a member of the “Forbes 30 under 30 Europe”, bringing together “the brightest young entrepreneurs, innovators and game changers in Europe”. In 2023, he received one of the Arne Richter Awards for Outstanding Early Career Scientists from the European Geosciences Union.