Prof. Dr. Ulrich Ranke, born in 1947, studied Geology at the University of Goettingen, Germany, where he later wrote his doctoral thesis on the marine sediments of the Northern Adriatic Sea in 1974. He joined the German Geological Survey (BGR) the same year, and worked for an extended period as a petroleum advisor to Bangladesh and Pakistan. For three years he was assigned to the Federal German Ministry for Technical Cooperation and Development as seconded expert for integrating geoscience in social and economic development projects. Later he became Head of the Department for Principles of Technical Cooperation, making him responsible for the BGR's project planning and evaluation in the context of international cooperation. During this time, he travelled to more than 30 countries, mostly in Asia, but also in southern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. In 2002, he was assigned as project leader for German-Indonesian technical cooperation in the field of natural disaster risk management.In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami disaster he served for many years in an advisory capacity to the Indonesian government concerning disaster risk management and the institutionalization of the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System. After returning from Indonesia to Germany in 2007, he was invited to hold lectures on natural disaster risk management at the Universities of Bonn and Clausthal. The following year, he was elected an honorary professor by the Geological Faculty at the University of Goettingen, where, since his retirement in 2012, he has continued to hold lectures on project management, planning and project evaluation.