KESS 2 Bangor University KESS 2 researcher Carlo Kupfernagel wins award at WSE 2022

Carlo Kupfernagel Presenting at Northern European Network for Wood Science and Engineering

Carlo Kupfernagel, a KESS 2 PhD candidate from Bangor University, recently won this year’s Student Award for Best Oral Presentation at the 18^th annual meeting of the Northern European Network for Wood Science and Engineering (WSE 2022), hosted by the University of Goettingen, Germany.

The network currently involves 10 partner countries, and its aim is to contribute to the optimization of resources spent within Wood Science and Engineering in the EFI NORD area. The goal is to coordinate Northern European research in this field by maintaining a link between senior researchers, PhD students, and industrial representatives. The network targets wood and wood-based products, their production, and their use in construction.

This year’s conference directed its focus towards ‘Tackling the scarcity of resources in the wood industry under changing European forestry conditions’. As part of the event, Carlo was able to attend a pre-conference workshop tailored specifically for PhD and early career researchers from across Northern Europe. This offered the delegates a chance to interact and share knowledge amongst emerging researchers in the field; an important benefit of collaborating within the Northern European Network for Wood Science and Engineering. The topic of the workshop was ‘Performance, potential, and limitations of European hardwoods’. Theoretical and practical lectures were given with a focus on:

Quality grading of sawn hardwood
Chemical wood modification
Gluing and finger jointing
Outdoor performance testing

Carlo was awarded for the best oral presentation in the conference and he said, “This conference was a great opportunity to present some of my most exciting work. I was quite surprised, but also very happy to win the award. Because science is always a collaborative effort, I would like to thank all my co-authors for making this research possible! I am very keen to be continuing it.”

Carlo also presented work from his thesis tilted ‘Cell wall diffusion of low molecular weight PUF resin studied by liquid- and solid-state NMR’ in which he was explaining the sub-microscopic material transport of Phenol-urea-formaldehyde resin in wood during drying.