Wolf prize awarded to Rien van Genuchten

Abstract

Martinus Th. (“Rien”) van Genuchten has been awarded the 2023 Wolf Prize in Agriculture. The Wolf Prize is awarded to “outstanding scientists and artists from around the world for achievements in the interest of humanity and friendly relations among people.” The prize is awarded in the disciplines of medicine, agriculture, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. For agricultural sciences, the Wolf Prize is widely considered one of the world’s most prestigious recognitions. Rien van Genuchten was born in 1945 in Vught, The Netherlands. He received his early education at the Agricultural University of Wageningen, The Netherlands, and his PhD at New Mexico State University in the United States. He then spent most of his career at the US Salinity Laboratory in Riverside, CA, before moving to the University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and to Utrecht University, The Netherlands. One of his most influential publications describes a closed-form equation for predicting the hydraulic conductivity of unsaturated soils, known as the van Genuchten equation (van Genuchten, 1980). He was, together with Jirka Simunek, the developer of the widely used HYDRUS software package for simulating the movement of water, heat, and solutes in variably saturated media (Šimůnek et al., 2016). Early in his career, he also published a compendium on analytical solutions of the one-dimensional convection–dispersion equation (van Genuchten & Alves, 1982), a resource widely used to analyse solute transport at the column and field scale.