Jaap van Thiel de Vries graduated from the department of Fluid Mechanics of Delft University of Technology in 2003. He worked in Deltares as a senior advisor/researcher. Later, he joined Hydronamic, the Engineering group of Boskalis in 2013 as an senior engineer within the Marine Environment and Morphology group. On behalf of Boskalis, Jaap has been part of the Ecoshape management team that coordinates Building with Nature programme. He was programme manager in the Building with Nature Indonesia project.