Chair of wood protection

Chair: The Chair of Wood Protection

Head of Chair: Dr. Milenko Mirić, full professor

Chair development:

The subject Wood protection is taught and attended at the Department of technologies, management and design of furniture and wood products of the Faculty of Forestry in Belgrade. Over the years the subject belonged to several departments, depending on the reorganizations which were carried out at the Faculty of Forestry.

Therefore, for some time the subject organizationally belonged to the Department of Forestry and the Chair of Forest protection, then to the Chair of primary wood processing, then again to the Chair of Protection of forests, wood and ornamental plants, then again to the Chair of Primary wood processing. All the time the subject was taught to second year students of the Department of wood industry, and wood processing, as the Department changed its name.
In 2006, on the day of Holy Cross on September 27th at the proposal, initiative and explanation of the teacher, prof. Dr. Milenko Mirić, the University Council in Belgrade issued a decision on the establishment of the Chair of wood protection, thus confirming the importance of the field that this scientific discipline deals with. The youngest chair still unfortunately has only one teacher and one professional associate for all accredited subjects. The teacher is prof. Dr. Milenko Mirić, and the professional associate is Grad. eng. Mimica Stefanović.
At the Department of wood protection study programs are accredited for undergraduate, master and doctoral studies in the fields studied at this Chair.

Given the chronic shortage of staff with a Master of Science or Master’s degree at the position of teaching assistant, so far a number of demonstrators from the rank of best students or young graduated engineers of wood processing have helped in the teaching of exercises. Unfortunately,  junior teaching assistants who were admitted did not justify the given trust and out of the four of them only one obtained a master’s degree and became a teaching assistant and later assistant professor, associate professor and full professor. Dr. Milenko Mirić, full professor is now the only teacher in all subjects at the Department of wood protection. This situation with the teaching staff in the field of wood protection is similar in the neighboring republics of former Yugoslavia, where a total of experts in this field is fewer than 10. The diversity and heterogeneity of the areas that this applied scientific discipline deals with is probably one of the reasons why young people are reluctant to deal with the problems of wood protection science. Despite this unfavorable situation and struggling of the Chair with staff issues, theoretical and practical courses take place smoothly and without problems, and students show a remarkable level of knowledge in this field.