History

The conference will be at the occasion of the 80th birthday of Martinus Th. (Rien) van Genuchten. Rien was born and spent his youth on a small farm in the south of the Netherlands. He graduated from Wageningen University (BSc and MSc) and obtained his doctorate at New Mexico State University in the USA. He worked for almost 30 years at the U.S. Salinity Laboratory in Riverside, California, and since 2008 has worked at UFRJ where he is now a Collaborating Professor in the Nuclear Engineering Department. He now divides his time between UFRJ in Brazil and Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Contemporary hydrology is unthinkable without Rien’s many contributions, which established links between agriculture, soil science, hydrogeology, the environmental sciences and civil engineering. During his 50-year career, he created an important scientific system based on improved understanding of fluid flow and contaminant transport processes in variably saturated porous media, including interactions of soils with the atmosphere and groundwater. His work profoundly improved predictions of field phenomena and motivated an avalanche of studies along similar lines to address the dynamics of water and chemicals in natural and engineered porous media.