Alik Ismail-Zadeh is a German/Russian geophysicist, who graduated from the Azerbaijan State University in Baku and the Lomonosov Moscow State University before being awarded PhD and DSc degrees from the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS in Moscow. He is Senior Scientist at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), RAS Chief Scientist (Russia), and Visiting Professor at Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris (France). He has been working at the University of Cambridge, UCLA, the University of Tokyo, and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. He is an author of over 120 peer-reviewed research papers and seven books. Ismail-Zadeh is secretary General of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) of ICSU, Council Member of the UNESCO-IUGS International Geoscience Program, and has been chair or member ofmany scientific committees of international ad intergovernmental organizations, incl. the American Geophysical Union, CTBTO, European Geosciences Union, EuroScience, Group on Earth Observations, and UNISDR. He is an honorary member and recipient of prestigious awards of several international organizations (www.mitp.ru/~aismail).