New Harvest 2018

Don works on agricultural biotechnology policy and advocacy at the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), which represents 1,000 members across biotech innovation sectors. Previously, Don supervised operations for an agricultural manufacturing firm in California, exporting nearly 200,000 tons of sulphur annually out of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. A classical pianist trained at Northwestern University and in Vienna, Austria, Don also co-produces music and arts events in Washington, DC.

Eben uses biology to solve fundamental human needs at industrial scales and in consumer applications. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ecovative which is creating the fabrication technology of the future using mycelium. Ecovative grows category defining products ranging from supple leather like textiles to molded sustainable packaging to high performance foams for apparel and beauty.

Dr. Mikel is currently the Chief Business Development Officer for John R White Company. For 25 years Dr. Mikel, served at three academic institutions with predominant roles related to meat safety and quality. At Mississippi State, he headed the Department of Food Science, Nutrition and Health Promotion, was interim head of Poultry Science and served as Associate VP for International Programs. Dr. Mikel has recently served as the President of Phi Tau Sigma, the American College of Animal Sciences, the American Meat Science Association, and the Southern Association of Agricultural Scientists Departments. He has been honored with the American Meat Science Association Achievement Award, Distinguished Industry/ Extension Award, Meritorious Service Award and named an AMSA Fellow. His international work has focused on over 40 different projects related to food security, capacity building, and technology development in both post-conflict and developing countries with a focal point on development and utilization of sustainable culturally and technologically appropriate science-based mechanisms.

Nadia Berenstein is a journalist and historian who writes about food, science, technology, and culture for outlets including New Food Economy, Food & Wine, NPR, and Popular Science. She has a PhD in in the History & Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently at work on her book, Flavor: An Artificial History, which tells the story of synthetic flavors and the people who make them.

Karien Bezuidenhout is a futurist and a director of the Shuttleworth Foundation, where she explores the role of intentional openness and experimental funding approaches in the pursuit of a more equitable world.

Biorealize is developing the next generation bioprototyping tools that allow users to design, test, iterate, and reproduce biological solutions at the bench, in the kitchen, or on the field. Our first product, Microbial Design Studio, is geared towards creating novel applications in probiotics, fermentation products, and food and flavor design using synthetic biology or microbiome approaches.

Headquartered in Boston, Ginkgo Bioworks uses the most advanced technology on the planet—biology—to grow products instead of manufacturing them. The company’s technology platform is bringing biotechnology into consumer goods markets, enabling better products from fragrance to food to pharmaceuticals.

Jack Bobo serves as the Senior Vice President and Chief Communications Officer for Intrexon, a synthetic biology company developing revolutionary solutions to the world's most pressing problems–in food, energy and health. In 2015, he was named by Scientific American one of the 100 most influential people in biotechnology today. He joined Intrexon from the U.S. Department of State where he worked for the past thirteen years as a senior advisor on global food policy, biotechnology and agricultural trade. He is an accomplished communicator, having delivered more than 300 speeches on the future of food, the role of science and technology in feeding the world and how to build consumer trust. Prior to his distinguished career at the U.S. Department of State, he was an attorney at Crowell & Moring LLP. He received a J.D., an M.S. in Environmental Science, a B.A. in psychology and chemistry and a B.S. in biology from Indiana University.

Travis Callue graduated from Keele University in 2014 with a degree in Biomedical Sciences. Shortly after, he began his PhD in Bioscaffolds at the University of Bath under the tutelage of Dr Paul De Bank, and New Harvest’s own Dr Marianne Ellis. His research focuses on investigating natural, renewable, and edible biopolymers for use as bioscaffolds on which to culture meat tissue. He has had the privilege of postering at conferences such as TCES across the UK, as well as the 3rd International Conference on Cultured Meat. He has also presented at public engagement events, introducing the field of cellular agriculture to secondary school students, and mature science-enthusiasts at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution. ​

Fahai Chen is an academic scientist who is working on developing animal serum-free media for the biopharmaceutical industry. This research is directed towards developing high performing processes to meet increasing market demands and to reduce manufacturing costs. Mammalian cell culture is an important area of research in the biopharmaceutical industry. Through two years of inquiry, Fahai has successfully established a high-throughput scheme that minimizes the screening time of serum-free media and provides a new platform to efficiently develop serum-free media for adherent cells.

Tobias is an analyst at Radicle Labs, a disruption research firm. Business leaders from some of the world’s biggest companies turn to Radicle to help them turn disruptive threats into opportunities. Radicle uses proprietary machine learning algorithms to identify comprehensive startup landscapes and pairs this with conversations with startup founders to better understand the companies and opportunities for engagement. Tobias has also worked at Deloitte Consulting and Citi, and he received his AB from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

Jamie Courtenay is a final year PhD student with the Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies at the University of Bath, UK. Working at the interface of chemical sciences and engineering, his research aims to address global sustainability challenges, such as the sustainable production of food and protecting the health of an ever-growing population, through a multidisciplinary approach. Specifically, his research focuses on utilising cellulose as a sustainable material to develop novel scaffolds for tissue engineering, using an array of chemical modifications and processing techniques to tailor make cellulose scaffolds with specific tunable properties to regulate cell response, as well as bioprinting and biofabrication techniques to create micropatterned and biomimetic 3D scaffolds for complex tissue generation.

Kathi Cover is Counsel at Sidley Austin where she works in intellectual property litigation. She also is pursuing an LLM in Food and Agriculture to combine her professional background in IP with her personal interest in supporting emerging technologies that will produce a cleaner, kinder food system. Prior to joining Sidley, Kathi worked for eleven years as Vice President – Intellectual Property and Assistant General Counsel at iBiquity Digital Corporation.

Dr. Cody Creelman is a beef cattle veterinarian, and digital storyteller who practices in Alberta, Canada. He is a partner at Veterinary Agri-Health Services, a large health management oriented veterinary practice that provides professional services and consulting to feedlot and cow/calf operations across Western Canada. A modern day James Herriot in the making, Cody shares his story in real-time, creating entertaining and educational videos of his daily adventures online.

Patrick D. Hopkins is a philosopher who specializes in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophical problems of science, neuroscience, medicine, and technology. He has a B.A. from the University of Mississippi in Psychology, worked in neuroscience research for a few years at a major medical school and a primate research center, and received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at Millsaps College and Professor of Psychiatry and member of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, both in Jackson, MS. He has published numerous articles on biomedical ethics, science and technology studies, and religious studies, and has edited several anthologies on practical ethics.

Ecovative uses biology to solve fundamental human needs at industrial scales and in consumer applications. Using Mycelium, the fabrication technology of the future, Ecovative creates category defining products ranging from beautiful leather like textiles to sustainable packaging to high performance foams for apparel and beauty. Ecovative also supports open innovation in universities, community labs, maker spaces and even your kitchen with knowledge and access to mycelium.

Adam Flynn was a reactor operator with the United States Navy’s Submarine Nuclear Propulsion Program before co-founding ForeLight, Inc., in 2013. At ForeLight, algae working with modular reactors absorb CO2 and produce food protein at a cost orders of magnitude below current practices. As Chief Technology Officer, Adam draws on his unique background in nuclear engineering and project management, to bring about carbon-negative, industrial scale photosynthesis. At this point, his bucket list consists of a single item – a Martian retirement.

Finless Foods is a San Francisco-based cellular agriculture startup founded in 2017. Its mission is to develop and mass manufacture pioneering marine animal food products for human consumption. Using cellular agriculture methods, Finless Foods aims to prevent the environmental devastation currently caused by industrial fishing and aquaculture. They hope to create a kinder, more efficient, and more sustainable food system for everybody.

Robert Bolton is a Canadian artist and strategist. As an advisor to Fortune 500 C-suites, Robert leads interdisciplinary teams, using design thinking and foresight methods, to solve complex problems and generate brand, revenue, and profit growth. Robert designed the board game, IMPACT, which teaches strategic foresight methods and encourages deliberate thinking about long-term future developments and uncertainties. His most recent work is Lonely Arcade, a speculative fiction (in song form) that explores the future of work and identity. Robert co-authored a perspective on policy, Biohackers: The Science, Politics, and Economics of Synthetic Biology, published in Innovations Journal (MIT Press, 2014). He was a National Science Foundation AoSL Innovation Fellow and holds a Masters of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. From Later is a foresight studio. We monitor and make sense of change, developing clear-sighted and judicious futures perspectives. We develop tools and ways of working that augment our research, problem-solving, and creative abilities. We explore the capacities of art, science, theory, and strategy to address complex challenges.

Cultured Meat and Future Food is a short-form podcast series discussing the role of plant based food, clean meat, and food technology. The show is focused on asking industry leaders questions for an audience with a non-scientific background. Cultured Meat and Future Food is targeted towards entrepreneurs interested in the food technology space.

Glenn R. Gaudette, PhD, is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He has pioneered the use of plants as scaffold for tissue regeneration. His work has been featured throughout the world including Bill Nye Saves the World, the BBC, and Fox National News. His work was named a top medical breakthroughs of 2017(Boston Magazine) and was one of the most popular stories of 2017 (National Geographic).

Current founder and CEO of Fork & Goode, which is developing delicious cultured meat products that are both safe to eat and good for the planet. Niya was also the CEO of Comcrop a vertical farming startup in Singapore. She has spent more than 10 years in food and agriculture businesses, including at McKinsey and Syngenta. She holds an MBA and MPAID from Harvard, and an Economics BA from Yale.

Yuki Hanyu graduated from the University of Oxford with a Ph.D in Chemistry in 2010, after which he continued his studies as a post-doctoral research associate at Tohoku University, Japan. From 2012 to 2014, Yuki was a research fellow at Systems Engineering Laboratory, Toshiba R&D Center. It was later in 2014 that he launched the “Shojinmeat Project”, a citizen science cellular agriculture initiative. One year later, he developed a low-cost culture media in his personal residence and launched Integriculture Inc. to commercialize clean meat. In 2017, Yuki won the Japan Global Impact Challenge by Singularity University.

Caleb Harper is the Principal Investigator and Director of the Open Agriculture (OpenAg) Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. He leads a diverse group of engineers, architects and scientists in the exploration and development of the future food systems. Caleb’s research focuses in the areas of control environment design, actuated sensing, control automation and data-driven resource, energy and biologic optimization. His group is developing an open-source agricultural hardware, software and data common with the goal of creating a more agile, transparent and collaborative food system. Caleb is a National Geographic Explorer and a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) New Vision for Agriculture Transformation Leaders Network. His work has been featured by TIME, WIRED, The Economist, IEEE, World Urban Forum (WUF), USAID and TED.

HigherSteaks is a clean meat company, providing meat without harming our health, planet or animals. Using state-of-the-art cell culture techniques, cells will be grown and differentiated by feeding them a rich, animal-free media. Our methods rely on Nobel award-winning technology, coupled with computational biology. Our unique and diverse team, combined with our novel approach will allow us to make clean meat the tasty, sustainable and ethical choice for everyone.

International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. is a leading innovator of sensorial experiences that move the world. At the heart of our company, we are fueled by a sense of discovery, constantly asking “what if?”. That passion for exploration drives us to co-create unique products that consumers taste, smell, or feel in fine fragrances and beauty, detergents and household goods, as well as beloved foods and beverages. Our 7,400 team members globally take advantage of leading consumer insights, research and development, creative expertise, and customer intimacy to develop differentiated offerings for consumer products.

Geltor makes animal free collagen. We’re doing this by designing microbes to produce the protein efficiently in large fermenters. Our product is a pure protein ingredient that offers performance, consistency and sustainability benefits to our large enterprise customers.

Scientists and researchers are highly curious and creative people, with finite ressources to explore their ideas. Devices developed for the scientific community are closed systems with high mark ups because large vendors monopolize the market. We have developed a modular incubation system with an open firmware platform that allows us to tailor our unit to the researcher's experimental needs. Our small footprint allows the incubator to be placed outside of the traditionally centralized incubation rooms, giving researchers independence from commonly shared facilities. The low-cost point enables scientists and cellular agriculturists to collaborate and explore outside the box ideas at a fraction of the infrastructure costs. Incuvers is a movement towards the decentralization of laboratory instrumentation, and allowing people to explore their curiosity.

Prakash Iyer is a fermentation engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks, managing automated lab-scale fermentation process development and coordinating tech transfer between the lab and commercial scale at 50,000L. With a background in biomedical engineering and neuroscience, Prakash came to fermentation engineering via his passion for homebrewing. While at home he uses brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), at Ginkgo, he works with a range of different fermenting yeast species designed to produce anything from industrial enzymes to cultured fragrances.

Kiran is using cellular agriculture to make meat better. Instead of targeting large, established meat products, we’re targeting areas in which clean meat has an immediate competitive advantage over animal meat. We’re looking at what we can do now that we couldn’t do before with animals, then using these advantages to create products that consumers will love.

Katharine Kreis is the director of strategic initiatives and lead for nutrition innovation at PATH. Engaging experts from across academia, civil society, and the private sector, Katharine works to address the alarming global burden of malnutrition, while simultaneously improving long-term sustainability of people and the planet. Katharine has worked for USAID, USDA, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and advised a number of international organizations including the World Economic Forum, WFP and WHO.

Jess Krieger is a biomedical sciences PhD student and Tedx speaker. Her research utilizes biomanufacturing and bioprinting to produce organs and tissues that replace the use of animals in research and the livestock industry. She started pursuing in cultured meat research in 2010, and in 2016 she was awarded a fellowship with New Harvest. She currently works in Dr. Min-Ho Kim’s Tissue Engineering and Innate Immunity Laboratory at Kent State.

Deepti Kulkarni is a senior associate in the FDA Regulatory practice at Sidley Austin, where she counsels clients on a wide range of regulatory matters, including issues relating to the use of novel and emerging technologies to develop foods and animal products. Since joining Sidley from the FDA Office of Chief Counsel in 2015, Deepti has focused her practice on providing strategic regulatory counseling to clients at various stages of a product’s lifecycle and otherwise complying with FDA and USDA regulations. While at FDA, Deepti counseled several components of FDA and HHS on issues relating to conventional foods, dietary supplements, animal products, and cosmetics, as well as cross-product matters involving new technologies, import/exports, and constitutional issues.

Stacy A. Love is a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology at Rutgers University-Camden. She has assisted under Dr. David Salas de la Cruz (Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Rutgers University-Camden) for two years in research regarding natural-based biomaterials. In the spring of 2018, she completed her bachelor’s of science in Biology magna cum laude from Rutgers.

New Age Meats is a San Francisco based cellular agriculture company. We create high quality meat which is healthier for consumers and better for the environment than anything that has ever existed. All without harming any animal. Our automated R&D platform allows us to create new products at unmatched speed and bring the world closer to a sustainable food ecosystem.

Nonfood is building the future of food today, creating radically sustainable algae-based foods to drastically reduce agriculture's resource and carbon footprint. Nonfood's first product, the Nonbar is available through their website.

Natalie Rubio is finishing her second year as a New Harvest Cultured Tissue Fellowship recipient at Tufts University in Boston. She is developing edible scaffolds for cultured meat with the David Kaplan Lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. For food applications, tissue engineering scaffolds should be edible, cost-effect and free from animal byproducts. Chitosan is commonly used as a scaffold material and can be fabricated into films, fibers, hydrogels and sponges. Typically, chitosan is obtained from crustacean exoskeletons, however, chitosan can also be isolated from mushrooms. This project investigates how mushroom chitosan compares to crustacean chitosan and analyzes its potential to serve as a biomaterial for cultured meat production.

Larisa Rudenko is a Visiting Scholar at MIT where she studies science- and values-based concerns for emerging biotechnologies. Previously, she developed FDA’s science-based policy for the regulation of animal biotechnology, consulted to the public and private sectors, and worked at an angel-level VC. Her PhD work in DNA damage and repair was conducted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory; she is a Diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology.

David Schildberger is in the final year of his PhD at the Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design (ETH Zürich/Switzerland) and the Centre for Ingredient and Beverage Research (ZHAW Wädenswil/Switzerland) where he explores the potential intersections of information technologies and food. His research deals with the dimensions of the symbolic in our current technics and invests in the daring idea of the affirmation of luxuriation, in its full decadence and decoupledness from an original nature. This notion finds one application in the production of chocolate from in vitro cultivated Theobroma cacao cells. David was initially trained as an architect at the FH Rosenheim (Germany), the TU Innsbruck (Austria) and the ETH Zürich (Switzerland).

Dr. Eric Schulze is a molecular biologist, genetic engineer, former Federal biotechnology regulator, educator, and science policy strategist. He is the current Vice President of Product and Regulation at Memphis Meats, where he leads the scientific design and development of Memphis Meats products as well as Federal regulatory, policy, and government affairs. Prior, Eric served for six years as a Federal regulator within the US Food and Drug Administration.

Vince Sewalt leads Product Stewardship & Regulatory for a division of DuPont that develops industrial biotechnology products aimed at improving sustainability of the bio-based economy, including the food supply chain. He manages product safety & compliance for DuPont and is passionate about capacity building in biotechnology regulatory oversight for emerging technologies and markets. Vince has shared his insights in product risk assessment, communication, and biotechnology acceptance with various associations, think tanks and regulatory agencies. His poster at the third New Harvest conference is a reminder of the general information needs to support consumer safety of cultured foods, and a call to action to the cell culture start-up community to align on a standard approach to gathering and documenting that information in the regulatory approval process for cultured meats.

Robin works with the tissue-engineering company VERIGRAFT on the re-vascularization of biomaterials, while pursuing his PhD at the University of Gothenburg. His work focuses on decellularized extracellular matrix properties and angiogenesis of 3D biomaterials with the help of induced pluripotent stem cells. In fall 2018, he will join David Kaplans lab at TUFT University as a visiting researcher. VERIGRAFT is a biotechnology company, located in Gothenburg, Sweden. The company utilizes 3D biomaterials to improve cell attachment and proliferation for use in regenerative medicine. The company’s unique technology platform turns donated allogeneic (“foreign”) tissue into an autologous (“personalized”) tissue and thus avoids transplant rejection. Donated, allogeneic tissue is patient-individualized by a combination of decellularization and recellularization processes. VERIGRAFT’s development pipeline comprises products in the areas of vascular regeneration and peripheral nerve repair.

Ron is CEO, President, and Executive Director of AquaBounty Technologies. He began his career in basic research at Merck, and has held a variety of positions in research and development at American Cyanamid, Wyeth, and MetaMorphix over the last forty five years. He is a member of the BIO Board of Directors, and is the Vice Chair of the Food and Agriculture Section Governing Board of BIO.

Andrew is a first year PhD student in Dr. David Kaplan’s lab at Tufts University, where he explores various exogenous and endogenous techniques for controlling skeletal muscle development and composition in vitro. Previously, he worked as a research assistant in Dr. Mark Post’s lab at Maastricht University, and as a molecular biology research associate at Geltor, Inc. in San Francisco. Andrew holds a B.S. in Materials Science from Rice University.

SunP Biotech creates advanced products that push for the highest quality of precision, accuracy, and sterility, so our users can perform research safely and confidently. Our passion and expertise in the industry allows us to create custom products that fit the needs of our clients. Our products have been adopted in areas of tissue engineering, biomimetic design, pharmaceutical research, organ-on-a-chip, and drug testing. SunP’s mission is to streamline companies’ approach into 3D bioprinting with a modern and simple bioprinter that that will help them focus on their objective and accelerate their research. SunP Biotech’s diverse offering of bioprinters, bioinks, and related services are the result of decades of rigorous research. The experts at SunP have spent their careers developing our state-of-the-art patented products and techniques to help you focus on performing cutting edge biological research. At SunP, we are committed to providing you with a tailor-made set of products so you can help cells work better for you.

Seafuture Sustainable Biotech is a cellular-agriculture company developing the technology to produce sustainable and secure seafood for human consumption. Using cell biology and molecular techniques, we are working to produce an competitively priced, high-quality fish fillet using cell lines developed from commercially important species. Our product will not only be a sustainable source of protein for a growing population, it will provide a cleaner and healthier product that is free of heavy metal contaminants found in the fish we eat.

Marcela Vilarino is a 5th year PhD student at the University of California, Davis. She came to the U.S. with a Fulbright Scholarship to advance her knowledge of embryology and stem cell biology. Studying under Pablo Ross, her research focuses on gene editing and embryonic stem cells in livestock species. Marcela earned her DVM and Master’s degree at the University of the Republic in Uruguay where she studies animal reproduction.

Dr. Wang is the most experienced executive in the algae and agriculture industries. He is also a board director of Algae Biomass Organization. He was the President of Syngenta China, the Director of Syngenta’s global Trait Research and Technology, the Director of Syngenta Functional Genomics, the Manager of Genomics at DuPont Pioneer Hi-Bred. Dr. Wang is author of over 50 patents, and has published over 20 peer-reviewed research articles.