The Graduate Student Horticulture Society (GSHS) provides an informal setting for graduate students in the Department of Horticulture to socialize and develop both personally and professionally.  Past events have included lunch meetings, holiday parties, and faculty judged cooking contests using horticultural crops such as apples.   Future events being discussed include bringing in a guest speaker for the department seminar series, collaborative community service and fundraising activities with the undergraduate horticulture club, and a research article-reading club.

GSHS members have a wide variety of horticultural interests and personal backgrounds.  Students are from not only horticulture, but also a number of interdisciplinary, interdepartmental programs including molecular, cellular, and developmental biology; ecology and evolutionary biology; and sustainable agriculture.  Examples of members research include studying the use of biochar in both vegetable and floriculture production, knowledge gain from school gardening programs in Uganda, molecular biology and genetics of turf grass and potato, seed banking turf species on athletic fields, use of genetic markers to study historical processes leading to the current distribution of Dirca, and industry analysis and grower aggregation of local foods producers using geographic information systems.

Back row: Jake Northhup, Bryan Peterson, Nick Dunlap, and Andrew Hoiberg.  Front row: Nadine Nedza, Jingjie Hao, Ying Feng, Nathan Butler, and Kevin Duerfeldt.  Members not pictured include Brandon Carpenter, Keting Chen, Dennis Katuuramu, Victoria Lebeaux, Tian Lin, Leah Riesselman, and Amanda Snodgrass

Officers: Ying Feng, treasurer; Andrew Hoiberg, co-president; Kevin Duerfeldt, co-president.  Officers not pictured: Dennis Katuuramu, Graduate and Professional Student Senate representative