Prof. em. Wolfgang Kinzelbach

Curriculum Vitae

Wolfgang Kinzelbach has been Full Professor of Hydromechanics at ETH Zurich from January 1996 to August 2014.

Prof. Kinzelbach was born in 1949 in Germersheim, Germany. He studied physics at the Universities of Mainz and Munich, and environmental engineering at Stanford University. He earned his doctorate in Civil Engineering from the University of Karlsruhe. He was recipient of a scholarship from the German Fellowship Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes). His professional activities have taken him to the North-East College of Arts and Science at 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 focused 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 5 books and more than 150 ISI-articles.

Since his retirement in 2014 Prof. Kinzelbach is heading the SDC-funded China-project “Rehabilitation and management strategy for over-pumped aquifers under a changing climate” under a mandate by ETH Zurich.