Nicholas (Nick) P. Howard an apple breeder and geneticist at Fresh Forward Breeding and Marketing B.V. in the Netherlands. The program is part owned by Wageningen University and Research where he is a guest scientist. Previously he held dual post-doc positions at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany and the University of Minnesota, USA. The latter institute is where he studied for his PhD under the apple breeding program that developed the ‘Honeycrisp’ apple. In addition to his breeding duties, he is leading ongoing research to genetically characterize the world’s economically, historically, and culturally important apples using SNP array data in a large international collaborative project.