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. Rien van Genuchten was the founding editor of Vadose Zone Journal, when he, 21 years ago, had the insight to initiate a new, multi-disciplinary journal to promote research related to the vadose zone, the zone between the soil surface and the groundwater table. This was at a time when environmental research was still in its infancy, and the new journal provided a common outlet for agronomy, soil science, hydrology, hydrogeophysics, biogeochemistry, civil engineering, and the emerging environmental sciences. Rien van Genuchten's foresight paved the way for innovative research and helped elevate vadose zone science to an established and respected field of research. The Wolf Prize was awarded to Rien van Genuchten “for his ground-breaking work in understanding water flow and predicting contaminant transport in soils.” On behalf of the editorial board of Vadose Zone Journal, we congratulate and celebrate Rien van Genuchten and his receipt of the Wolf Prize. Venkataraman Lakshmi: Conceptualization; writing—review and editing. Markus Flury: Conceptualization; writing—original draft; writing—review and editing.