Sabine Rosner studied forestry and made her PhD in 1998 at BOKU University, Vienna. She was awarded a Hertha Firnberg Scholarship in 2006 and Elise Richter Scholarship in 2009. Until 2012 she was employed within several consecutive projects funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and by the European Union. In 2013, she obtained the Venia docendi for “Ecophysiology of plants” and, since 2017, she is an associate professor at the Institute of Botany at BOKU University, Vienna. Sabine Rosner is a specialist in structure-function relationships of woody plants. Her main research interest is to find reliable functional traits for hydraulic and biomechanical characteristics of tree stems including the wood and the bark. She developed an acoustic emission feature analysis method to estimate hydraulic conductivity loss in conifers. This approach led to new recoveries regarding sapwood shrinkage above fiber saturation that contradicts traditional doctrines. In addition, she introduced several novel functional traits to estimate the hydraulic vulnerability of woody plant stems. She is also interested in host plant – insect interactions, where she has been investigating the constitutive defense potential of conifers against bark beetles. To sum up, she is focused on interdisciplinary research covering plant physiology, biomechanics, plant anatomy and forest entomology, aiming at a better understanding of functional aspects of trees.