Hans Wijmans received his master’s degree in chemical engineering in 1980. He then worked in the membrane research group of Professor C.A. Smolders at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, where he received his Ph.D. in 1984. The subject of his thesis was the mechanism of formation of membranes and the concentration polarization phenomenon in ultrafiltration. He was awarded the 1984 Royal Dutch/Shell Research Award for young scientists.
Wijmans joined Membrane Technology and Research, Inc. (MTR) in Menlo Park, California, in 1984 as a Senior Research Scientist, and has spent his entire career at MTR. In 1988, he became the Director of Research and in 2007 became the President of MTR. By that time, MTR had grown from a research company into a company that designs, fabricates and sells complete membrane separation systems to customers worldwide in the petrochemical, refining and natural gas industries.
Hans Wijmans served as President of the North American Membrane Society in 2003–2004 and was a member of the NAMS Board of Directors from 1998–2006. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Membrane Science since 2009.
Wijmans frequently gives presentations at national and international conferences and for over ten years was co-presenter of the AIChE Continuing Education Course “Industrial Separations Using Membranes.” He is named as inventor or co-inventor on over 50 U.S. patents and his scientific publications have received over 9,000 citations per Google Scholar.