Wolfgang Kinzelbach

Wolfgang Kinzelbach has been Full Professor of Hydromechanics at ETH Zurich from January 1996 to August 2014. Till March 2021 he still had a mandate as emeritus at ETH Zurich.

Prof. Kinzelbach was born in 1949 in Germersheim, Germany, is married and has four children. He studied physics at the Universities of Mainz and Munich. After a period of study at Stanford University in 1972, he transferred to the field of environmental engineering where he earned his doctorate from the University of Karlsruhe. He was the recipient of a scholarship from the German Fellowship Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes). 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. He completed his habilitation requirement at the University of Stuttgart in 1987. 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.

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 things he was awarded the European "Förderpreis" of the Körber Foundation, 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 6 books and more than 150 ISI-articles. As emeritus, he headed the SDC financed Sino-Swiss groundwater project "Rehabilitation and management strategy for over-pumped aquifers under a changing climate" till March 2021.