Dr. Horst Herbert Gerke

Horst H. Gerke is senior scientist and head of the Working Group “Hydropedology” (since 2018) in Research Area 1 "Landscape Functioning" of the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) Müncheberg, Germany. His research is focussing on soil physics and soil hydrology. He earned a Diploma in Agriculture (1980) and a Ph.D. in forestry (1987), both from the University of Göttingen. He worked as postdoc first at the Technical University of Braunschweig (1987-1989) and later at the U.S. Salinity Laboratory, USDA-ARS, in Riverside, CA (1990-1992), where he developed a numerical dual-permeability model to describe preferential flow and solute transport. As a visiting scientist at the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, University of Waterloo, Canada (1996), he included shrinking core-type kinetic in a multi-component reactive solute transport model. He earned a postdoctoral lecture qualification at the University of Cottbus (2004) in Environmental Sciences and later in Soil Science at the Agricultural Faculty of the University of Kiel (2015). He served in the German Soil Science Society as vice president (2012 - 2015) and head/co-head of the soil physics commission (2002-2005). His main research interest is preferential flow and transport processes in structured and heterogeneous soils. Currently, his research is particularly focussing on local-scale effects of clay-organic macropore coatings on the mass exchange between macropores and the soil matrix.