Rupert Wimmer

Rupert Wimmer (Kuchl, 1960) is an Austrian materials researcher, wood scientist and professor at the Institute for Wood Technology and Renewable Materials at BOKU University, who is an elected fellow (FIAWS) of the International Academy of Wood Science.

Career
Wimmer studied wood science and technology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, where he completed all of his graduate studies. He also studied technical environmental protection at the Technical University of Vienna as well as at the BOKU University,.

He has been employed as an adjunct professor at the Mendel University in Brno in Czech Republic (Department of Wood Science), full professor and head of the Wood Technology and Wood-based Composites Unit at University of Göttingen, R&D Manager at Funder Industries, and key researcher in the Austrian research institute, Wood K plus.

His research interests include, among others, wood quality, wood biology, bio-based fibre materials, wood-based composites, wood products industry, biomaterials and sustainability issues. Wimmer is an IUFRO office holder in wood technology, and he has been a member of editorial boards in several scientific journals, including Les/Wood, Wood and Fiber Science, Frontiers in Chemistry, Southern Forests, Springer Series in Wood Science, and Dendrochronologia.

In 2021/22, he served as the president of the International Society of Wood Science and Technology. His research teams have won awards in the area of biomaterials and wood products. Since 2021, he has been organising The Wood Science Talks.

In June 2023, Wimmer was elected as the secretary of the executive committee of the International Academy of Wood Science, an international academy and non-profit assembly of wood scientists, which represents worldwide all the fields of wood sciences.

In October 2023, a meta-research carried out by John Ioannidis et al. at Stanford University included Rupert Wimmer in Elsevier Data 2022, where he was ranked at the top 2% of researchers of all time in wood science (forestry – polymers), having a c-index of 3.348 He also possesses an h-index of 53 and more than 8,000 international citations at Google Scholar.

Personal life
Wimmer lives permanently in Vienna.