Prof. Carlos Guedes Soares is a Distinguished Professor of Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon. He is the Scientific Coordinator of the Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering (CENTEC), which is a research centre classified by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology as Excellent in 2014 and 2018. He received the MSc. and Ocean Engineer degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA in 1976, the Ph.D. degree from the Norwegian Institute of Technology of the University of Trondheim, in 1984, and the Doctor of Science degree from the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, in 1991. He is Doctor Honoris causa from the Technical University of Varna (2003) and University Dunarea de Jos in Galati, (2004). He has supervised more than 55 PhD students, has co-authored more than 700 journal papers and has more than 20,000 citations in Web of Science (29,000 in SCOPUS). He is one of the 5 Founding Members of the European Safety and Reliability Association (ESRA), and has been General Secretary, Vice-Chairman and Chairman of ESRA. He has been Chairman of the International Maritime Association of the Mediterranean (IMAM) (2005-2011; 2017-2019) and of the ISSC - Ship and Offshore Structures Congress (2012-2015). He has been Chair or Co-Chair of various conferences in the series of OMAE, ESREL, IMAM, MARSTRUCT, MARTECH, ICCGS and RENEW Conferences. He has been coordinating the Symposium on Structures, Safety and Reliability of the Ocean, Offshore and Arctic Engineering (OMAE) Conference since 1989. He has been Editor and Editor-in-Chief of the Reliability Engineering and System Safety Journal (Elsevier) since 1992, is Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal for Marine Science and Application (Springer) and he belongs to the Editorial Board of more than 15 Journals. He is a Fellow of SNAME, RINA, IMarEST and ASME, "Membro Conselheiro" of Ordem dos Engenheiros, Member of ASCE, AGU, AMS and SRA and Member of the Portuguese Academy of Engineering.