Serena Di Gaetano from Istituto Centrale per il Restauro (Italy) was unanimously elected as Board Member at the 2nd General Assembly held at the University of Pardubice, Faculty of Restoration (Litomyšl, Czech Republic) on 3-4 April 2025.

Serena is a conservator-restorer with a dual academic and professional background in art history and conservation of cultural heritage. Since 2018 she has been a civil servant in the position of senior conservator-restorer at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro (Italy), working in the stone and mosaic laboratories. Her research interests and publications focus on the polychromy of stone statues and ancient mosaic techniques, classical and medieval decorative systems and the relevance of cultural heritage. She has obtained her PhD (July 2025) with a thesis focusing on the definition and conservation issues of rupestrian contexts and hypogeal environments.

She is involved in several projects for the conservation and enhancement cultural heritage assets, collaborating with non-profit organisations and research centres and she is actively involved in the representation of the profession as a member of the Board of ARI (Association of Conservator-Restorers of Italy).

Sabina Simonič holds a degree in Conservation and Restoration of Modern and Contemporary Art, with a diploma thesis on risk analysis of computer-based art. She is a Senior Scientist at the Institute for Conservation and Restoration at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she teaches and conducts research in the field of modern and contemporary art conservation. Within the Institute, she is the primary contact for questions relating to modern materials—particularly plastics—and their degradation phenomena. She is currently pursuing a PhD on the influence of hacker culture on conservation.

Simonič has been active in professional advocacy, serving for many years as a board member and Vice President of the Austrian professional association of conservators and restorers (ÖRV), where she engaged with questions of professional identity and the role definition within conservation–restoration. She led the working group that developed Austria’s first fee guidelines for conservation–restoration services, published in 2025. As a delegate to the European Confederation of Conservator-Restorers’ Organisations (E.C.C.O.), she contributed to efforts toward European standards for professional title protection and the harmonized classification of the profession.

She currently serves as treasurer of the European Network for Conservation-Restoration Education (ENCoRE) and holds the Vienna-based institutional seat within the organisation. Her work focuses on professional competencies, qualification frameworks, and educational standards.

Nico Broers holds a Master degree in Conservation of Fine Art from Northumbria University Newcastle, UK. He is a professor in the department of Conservation-Restoration of Works of Art at the École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc in Liège, is a member of the AAP (Art, Archéologie et Patrimoine) research unit of the ULiège and has been working in the public and private sectors since 2003. With professional experience in the field of painting conservation as well as conservation of modern and contemporary art, he is primarily interested in the role of education and research in conservation-restoration. He joined the board of ENCoRE in 2014 and is currently serving as vice treasurer. He is active as a member of the board of the Professional Conservator-Restorer Association in Belgium (APROA/BRK), and a member of the editorial board of CeROArt, an online publication and a platfom for pluridisicplinary approaches in issues of conservation, exhibition and restoration of works of art.

Laura Fuster-López is a Professor at the Conservation Department in the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain. After several research fellowships at Istituto Centrale per il Restauro and the Smithsonian Institution, she got her PhD in Conservation with honors from UPV where she coordinates the area on the study of the mechanical and dimensional properties of cultural materials since 2007. She has been involved in numerous international R+D projects always with a special focus on understanding the mechanisms involved in paintings behavior and degradation and their implications in the design of conservation strategies. She serves as expert for several European Research Agencies and research programs of the European Commission and the United States. Apart from presenting her research in peer reviewed journals, books, conferences and symposia, she has supervised many BA, MA and PhD projects as well as research internships. She is particularly interested in education, lifelong learning and dissemination, having served as assistant coordinator of ICOM-CC Education & Training Working Group (2011-2021) and having been responsible for many international conferences and workshops since 2005. She is currently Vice-chair of the European Network for Conservation Restoration Education (ENCoRE), where she has been actively involved since 2010. Finally, she is founding member of the digital platform AcCESS- Academic Conservation Education Sharing Site, (see News in Conservation, vol. 78, June 2020), editor-in-chief of the series Conservation 360º, (https://monografias.editorial.upv.es/index.php/con_360/issue/archive) and member of the Editorial Board of GE_Conservación, the Journal of the Spanish Group of IIC (https://ge-iic.com/ojs/index.php/revista).

Adrian Heritage M.A. DIPL. CONS (Courtauld) ACR, FIIC was appointed Professor of Wall Paintings Conservation at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences (Technische Hochschule Köln) in March 2002. Adrian’s primary teaching and research areas are conservation philosophy, conservation approaches for wall painting and Street Art, preventive conservation, and research into deterioration processes of porous building materials. Adrian has taken over 200 German and Polish students and young conservators to the Auschwitz- Birkenau Museum in Poland to undertake conservation work in this place of memory (an ongoing annual project since 2003). Adrian has been involved in numerous national and international research projects. In 2016, together with physicist Prof. Dr Birgit Kanngießer (Technical University Berlin) and archaeologist Prof. Dr Stephan G. Schmid (Humboldt University Berlin), they led the multidisciplinary Petra Painting Conservation Project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In addition, Adrian has undertaken extensive research into and publications on salt-reduction methodologies for wall paintings and stone.