Dr. Thomas Hardy holds a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering, M.S. and B.S. degrees in Biology and a B.S. in Secondary Education. He is a tenured Full Professor in the Department of Biology at Texas State University and holds the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment (MCWE) Endowed Professorship for Environmental Flows and is the Chief Science Officer at MCWE. Dr. Hardy was a tenured Full Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Utah State University where he was the Director of the Institute for Natural Systems Engineering for 21 years and the Associate Director of the Utah Water Research Laboratory for 10 years. He is a founding member and Past-President of the Ecohydraulics Section of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research and served on the National Academy of Science Committee on review of the Texas Instream Flow Program. Dr. Hardy’s career has spanned a wide array of fundamental and applied multidisciplinary research including the development, testing, validation, and application of assessment methodologies in aquatic systems. His research includes use of unmanned autonomous vehicles for remote sensing and image processing, aquatic ecosystems modeling, aquatic vegetation and macroinvertebrate dynamics, river and reservoir water quantity modeling and distributed watershed modeling. He is also active in the evaluation of fresh water inflows on bay and estuary health and recreation based impacts to fish, aquatic macrophytes and macroinvertebrate communities. He is an internationally recognized expert in instream flow assessments and has collaborated with national instream flow and river restoration programs in the United States, Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, western European countries, South Korea, and Japan.