Poster Session Awards

It's decidedly low-tech in a high-tech world but it's a very effective way to show research. It's a poster session and Richard Hoff, Director of Viticulture for Mercer Canyons recently headed up the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers Poster session at their annual conference.

HOFF: The poster session serves a couple purposes. One purpose is kind of as a transmission mechanism for the industry to see where some of their research dollars have been spent. So a lot of the research posters that you saw were funded by Washington industry funded programs such as WAWGG, the Washington Wine Industry Foundation and other ones. And then it also gives students a chance to learn to communicate on a subject that they're unique experts on.

Awards are given in three categories; Graduate, Undergraduate and Professional.

HOFF: Graduate and professional are fairly similar, typically professional is going to be a PhD level researcher who runs their own lab. In most of those cases they're going to have Masters and PhD students as graduate students that are also going to be conducting similar research that either supports or is very similar to what they're conducting. And then you do get a few under graduate students that are pretty motivated.

Posters were judged by industry stakeholders. 1st Place Graduate was Eric Gale, Washington State University. 1st Place under grad went to Daniel Hottell, Washington State University and the 1st place professional was awarded to Michelle Moyer, Washington State University.

That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.