Germán Poveda Jaramillo is a Civil Engineer and Master in Water Resources Development from the School of Mines of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia; Master in Engineering Sciences from the University of California, Davis, California, United States; Ph.D. in Water Resources from the School of Mines and Post-Doctorate, Hydro-Ecology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States. Since 1998 he has been a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), being one of the Lead Authors of the Latin American chapter for the IPCC Reports.

Professor Poveda Jaramillo is a Full Member of the Colombian Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences, he also assumed as director of the Antioquia Chapter of ACCEFYN replacing Dr. Angela Restrepo Moreno, who participated in the first Mission of Wise Men. He has received 3 times the Alejandro Angel Escobar Foundation Award in the category of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences and Environment and Sustainable Development, in addition to 3 Honorable Mentions in such awards.

His research areas are Hydrology, Climatology, Meteorology, Oceanography, Ecology, Influence and Effects of El Niño and La Niña in Colombia and the South American tropics. Links between climate variability and human health; Environmental Sciences; Climate Change in Colombia and tropical South America; Chaos, Fractals, Scaling, and Nonlinear Dynamical Systems in Geophysics and Turbulence; Stochastic Processes and Time Series Prediction; Applied Mathematics in Engineering.