Committee on Education and Professional Development
Scope
Major goals of IAHR, founded in 1935, were to stimulate and promote basic and applied research in hydraulics and hydraulic engineering, and to provide a forum for the international community of hydraulic engineers. Today it is an association of several thousand individual members of all continents. We need to fill the gap between fluid research and the practice of hydraulic engineering emphasising the importance of application-oriented research and much larger-scale of involvement of practising engineers in the activities of IAHR. The Committee on Education and Professional Development was formed in 1995 based on the work of a Task Group headed by Prof. Helmut Kobus for several years. The activity of the Committee is aimed at enhancing technology transfer in several aspects. Education is the classical sense of transferring knowledge to the next generation. The dialogue between practising engineers and researchers also needs to be intensified to fill the existing gap. Continuing education for engineers aims at brushing up their professional skills to cope with new developments in technology or professional practices.
Annual report
Agenda
The main targets of the EPD Committee concern regional and world wide activities promoting education and professional development. Regional activities are important to initiate and coordinate regional activities and to link them to world wide activities. Actual important activities of EPD are the Media Library, or events related with the Young Professionals Networks, e.g. the IAHR Young Professionals Congress, the IAHR Young Professionals Hydro-environment Challenge, or the webinars related with education and porfessional development.
Media Library
This very valuable and huge resource for education and professional development contains different kinds of multimedia material (photos, videos, e-books, software, ...).
For more information about the multimedia library, click here.
The IAHR Young Professionals Congress
The IAHR technical committee on Education and Professional Development organizes annually the congress for young professionals. The aim is to give the opportunity to young professionals to present their work, get feedback from mentors and network with their peers. The proceedings will be published and made available in the IAHR e-library after the congress. For more information on the IAHR Young Professionals Congress, click here.
Young Professionals Networks (YPN)
The Young Professionals Networks (YPN) support the education and professional development of future engineers and scientists in the hydraulic community by 
providing a common platform, carry out different water-related activities, projects and educational programmes; they also conduct special activities in the scope of the biennial world congress. By such means, students should be brought into contact with profession in practise and research already in an early stage of their education, learn from other IAHR members and create a network for their future careers. For more information about the Young Professionals Networks, click here.
The IAHR Young Professionals Hydro-Environment challenge
The IAHR Young Professionals Hydro-Environment challenge seeks to promote international and interdisciplinary collaboration among young professionals and academics working at institutions across the globe in the hydro-environment field. It is an open contest, hence any kind of young professional profile working on any of the IAHR main themes is welcome to take part in the initiative. A number of representative case studies aligned with IAHR themes are be assigned to the participating teams who, after a period of web-based collaborative engineering work, present their project outcomes during an IAHR webinar. A number of project stakeholders, including universities, companies, and public authorities are involved during the design and mentoring of the case-studies. A jury made up of senior IAHR members and representatives from partners in industry evaluate the teams.
For more information on the IAHR Young Professionals Hydro-Environment challenge click here.
Technical Seminars and Webinars
In order to strengthen the role of education within IAHR and to make it more visible, EPD suggests different kinds of education-related technical seminars and webinars for IAHR Congresses. In this activity the attempt is included to stronger integrate young professionals into work of IAHR.
News & Documents
Call for papers for the Special Issue "Education and professional development in hydro-environmental engineering"on the interactive open-access journal GeosciencesCommunication.
Article "Fostering Global Partnerships by Education and Professional Development" published in Hydrolink issue 3/2017 on EPD and the SDGs, the committee's vision and activities - including some updates on HydroWeb from the years 2016 and 2017.