Rafael Schmitt is a Lead Scientist at the Natural Capital Project and the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. His work is centered around the role of build and natural infrastructure for the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus from global to local scales. As rivers are central connectors in natural ecosystems and the WEF nexus, much of his work focusses on large rivers, such as the Mekong or the Amazon. Rafael has been driving the development of new models, e.g., for global sediment transport, landslides, and water quality and spearheads their integration into frameworks for strategic decision and robust decision making under climate change. He previously was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Berkeley College for Environmental Design, where he worked on trade-offs between climate mitigation and adaptation for the Mekong. He holds a PhD in Information Technology from Politecnico di Milano.