2019 ASHS Annual Conference

Chengyan Yue is the first holder of the Bachman Endowed Chair in Horticultural Marketing at the University of Minnesota. Over the last decade she has advanced and merged the emergent fields of horticultural marketing and behavioral economics through her scholarship and graduate teaching and mentoring.

Dr. Yue has regularly offered two courses: Horticultural Marketing and Informational & Behavioral Economics. In both courses she strives to develop a student-centered active learning environment that incorporates in-class games and experiments with discussions, guest speakers and field trips. She has received consistently excellent student evaluations for each class with an average rating of 5.73 out of 6 for overall teaching effectiveness and 100% of students would recommend her as an instructor to other students. Horticultural Marketing explores how the differences between horticultural products and agricultural commodity crops make the horticultural marketing system unique. Informational & Behavioral Economics, a Ph.D. course, introduces new theories of consumer behavior and examines how to apply these theories (irrationality, heuristics, prospect theory, mental accounting, time discounting, etc.) to study consumers’ food and horticultural product consumption and choice. Dr. Yue’s versatile teaching formats greatly help students understand and memorize abstract economics and marketing concepts.

Dr. Yue has been a popular and prolific graduate mentor having advised/co-advised 10 MS and 4 PhD students to completion in the Applied Plant Sciences and Applied Economics graduate programs. She has served on 10 additional graduate committees and currently advises 5 MS and 4 PhD students. She designed a Horticultural Marketing graduate program curriculum that includes diverse graduate courses from the Horticultural Science and Applied Economics departments, and the Carlson School of Management. Most of her students are co-authors on published papers.

In addition to serving as Chair and Secretary of the ASHS Horticultural Marketing Working Group, Dr. Yue brought recognition to horticultural marketing and economics by the larger economics community in the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (the largest global agricultural economics association). She initiated and is first chair of the “Specialty Crop Economics Section” in the AAEA to facilitate networking and collaboration between researchers working on specialty crops. The section has attracted many graduate student members stimulated in part by best paper and dissertation awards.

Dr. Yue received her PhD in Economics and MS in Statistics at Iowa State University, and MS in Quantitative Economics and Management, BS in International Project Management and BA in English at Tianjin University, Tianjin, China