Kinzelbach, Wolfgang, Prof. Dr.

Curriculum Vitae

Wolfgang Kinzelbach has been Full Professor of Hydromechanics at ETH Zurich since January 1996.

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. He was awarded the Ehrensenator Huber Prize by the University of Karlsruhe, the European "Förderpreis" of the Körber Foundation, the Softwareprize of the German Federal Minister of Research, the Henry Darcy medal of the European Geophysical Society and the Saudi-Arabian Prince Sultan International Prize for Water. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He serves among other things as president of the North-South Centre of ETH, as member of the Leuenberger Commission on the NEAT tunnels and delegate of the president of ETH for professorial search commissions.

Research Interests

• Flow and transport processes in aquifers including chemical reactions, density effects, and two phase flow.
• Turbulence and the mechanisms of transport and mixing in surface water systems.
• Numerical methods for the solution of flow and transport equations.
• Sustainable water resources management in arid and semiarid regions.
• Nuclear waste repositories.

Teaching

• Basic Courses (1st and 2nd academic years)
  Hydraulics I
  Basic Water Resources Management
• Specialized Courses (3rd and 4th academic years)
  Hydraulics II
  Groundwater I
  Groundwater II
  Computer Lab for Groundwater
  Modeling Water Quality in Streams and Lakes
  Semester Project: Water Resources Management
  Seminar Hydromechanics und Groundwater
  Seminar Environmental Engineering
• Master Theses
  Subjects for Master Theses
• Doctoral Theses
  Subjects for Doctoral Theses

Research Projects

See research projects of the group

Publications

• Publications (2005-2009)
• Publications (2000-2004)
• Publications (before 1999)

Talks

• Sustainable Water Management in Arid and Semi-arid Environments (37MB powerpoint presentation)
• Groundwater Modeling and Environmental Tracer Information (20MB powerpoint presentation)
• Management of fresh groundwater lenses in the Aral sea region (34MB powerpoint presentation)
• Stochastic Groundwater Modeling or How to Cope with Uncertainty (4MB powerpoint presentation)
• Groundwater Management of the Iullemeden Aquifer System (11MB powerpoint presentation)
• Density driven flow in porous media: How accurate are our models? (11MB powerpoint presentation)
• Upscaling and effective properties in saturated zone transport (2MB powerpoint presentation)

Interviews

Water under ground: Talk about the conservation of our most important resource. (Interview in German)

• Video download in low resolution (91MB avi)
• Video download in higher resolution (218MB avi)