Dr Kidia Gelaye is the Science and Data Lead for the NASA-USAID initiative, SERVIR West Africa. Dr Gelaye role is supporting West Africa regional partners in enhancing awareness and accessibility to geospatial data and providing technical and scientific support for valuable user-driven services, data, models, and tools. Before joining ICRISAT, Dr Gelaye was an assistant professor at the University of Gondar in Ethiopia. Dr Gelaye has extensive expertise in agriculture water management, mitigating soil salinity in irrigated lands, irrigation design and planning, irrigation’s environmental impacts, and data science. Dr Gelaye is keenly interested in ecological big-data science, cloud computing, and remote sensing and machine learning applications in water and agriculture. Dr Gelaye has contributed to peer-reviewed publications. He received his Ph.D. in Agricultural Water and Environment from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, Austria.