Sue Anagnost is Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York (SUNY), College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, USA, where she continues to serve as the Director of the Tropical Timber Information Center. Sue always liked biology and studying plants, which brought her to wood anatomy, as it had an application to wood products. Beside wood anatomy Sue has also worked on topics such as wood ultrastructure, wood decay, and mycology, with light microscopy, scanning and transmission electron microscopy being always heavily utilized techniques in her work and in teaching. Sue explains the importance of wood identification of tropical species to help preventing illegal timber trading. As wood anatomy for the identification of wood species is an "imperfect science", Sue also talks about using DNA and chemical fingerprint information to better identify commercially traded timber. With the todays developments in wood science, especially with the increasing mass timber constructions, she is convinced that wood anatomy will continue to be an attractive and important study method.

Alfred Teischinger is internationally one of the most prominent wood technologists. Before retiring he was Full Professor at BOKU Vienna, Austria, and he is talking about what brought him into wood, and shares his philosophy about technology, science, also with respect to society. The major focus of this talk is on the now published Springer Handbook of Wood Science and Technology, which he co-edited, an over 2000 pages strong volume covering wood biology, chemistry and physics, structure-property relations, wood-based materials, and much more. Professor Teischinger talks about fundamental technological perspectives and industrial processes beyond sawmilling, the manufacturing of wood products, leading to wood applications. With great appreciation of wood as a resource, he is a person who has the unique gift of thinking ahead of time.

Wayan Darmawan is a Full Professor at the Department of Forest Product, Bogor Agricultural University (IPB University), Indonesia, where he is with the Wood Quality Improvement Technology Division. His interests are around machining of wood, and how to improve lower quality plantation wood though modification trials. Prof. Darmawan is talking about his research, about the offered wood program, the many students they are getting each year, about the wood industry in Indonesia, and how important it is to use more wood in civil engineering. Prof. Daramawan also tells about the value of having their wood program accredited by SWST, which helped to raise the standards and the international visibility.