Wolfgang Kinzelbach

Wolfgang Kinzelbach studied physics at the Universities of Mainz and Munich and environmental engineering at Stanford University. He earned his doctorate in environmental engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 1978. His professional activities have taken him to Maiduguri, Nigeria, the Nuclear Research Center in Karlsruhe, and the Environmental Research Institute of the Academia Sinica in Beijing. In 1988 he was appointed full professor of Technical Hydraulics and Hydrology at the University of Kassel and in 1993 full professor of Environmental Physics at the University of Heidelberg. Since 1996 he has been Full Professor of Hydromechanics and Groundwater at ETH Zurich His research focuses on flow and transport processes in the environment with practical applications in water resources management, pollution control, remediation and nuclear waste isolation. His current main interest is sustainable water resources management in arid and semi-arid regions, mainly in Africa and China. Among other honors he was awarded the Koerber European Science Prize, the Henry Darcy medal of the European Geophysical Society, the Saudi-Arabian Prince Sultan International Prize for Water and the Muelheim Water Award. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and Distinguished Affiliated Professor of the Technical University of Munich. He has published 5 books and more than 200 ISI-articles. Since his retirement in 2014 he has been heading the China Groundwater Project of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The project has the title: “Rehabilitation and Management Strategy for Overpumped Aquifers under Changing Climate” with case studies in Guantao (Hebei) and Zhangye (Gansu).