David R. Maidment is a specialist in surface water hydrology and the application of geographic information systems (GIS) to hydrology. He is the Hussein M. Alharthy Centennial Chair Emeritus in Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he served on the faculty from 1981 to 2019. He received his bachelor's degree in agricultural engineering from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and his MS and PhD degrees in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.