Dr. van Genuchten is a Collaborating Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is also a Visiting Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Utrecht University.

Dr. van Genuchten began his soil physics studies in the 1960’s at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, where he earned his BS and MS degree studying irrigation and drainage. He earned his Ph.D. in Soil Physics at New Mexico State University, then completed a postdoc at Princeton University.

Dr. van Genuchten was an Adjunct Professor at UC Riverside from 1987 to 2005, a Supervisory Soil Scientist and Research Leader at the US Salinity Lab from 1986 to 2003, and a Soil Physicist at the US Salinity Lab from 2003 to 2008.
He has received numerous awards throughout his career and is a fellow of multiple scientific societies which include SSSA, ASA, AGU, and AAAS. More recently, he received the American Geophysical Union’s Robert E. Horton Medal for “outstanding contributions to hydrology” in 2020.

Dr. van Genuchten is a very well-known and highly regarded scientist having contributed to major advancements in a wide range of research areas including soil science, soil physics, hydrology, environmental science, agriculture, and civil engineering. It has been said that Dr. van Genuchten’s research “materially transformed our understanding of flow and transport processes in porous media”.