Professor Hilde Nybom was employed at Balsgård, Department of Plant Breeding, for 30 years but retired a few years ago. At Balsgård, she was responsible for the apple breeding program, resulting in the release of the scab-resistant varieties ‘Fredrik’ and ‘Frida’ and numerous other cultivars. She was also involved in basic and applied research on the genetics of disease resistance self-incompatibility as well as various fruit quality parameters, mainly in apples. She has also worked with some other fruit and berry crops, including the dogroses, Rosa sect. Caninae, which have a unique meiosis, resulting in an interesting population structure and a very complicated taxonomy. She is still very interested in factors affecting genetic variability in germplasm collections and wild relatives of crop plants, as well as suitable methods (mostly DNA-based) to quantify this variation and to study population genetics and plant taxonomy, and continues to analyze data and write papers on these topics.