In 2020, New Harvest welcomed 13 new grantees to our research community, bringing our total number of current researchers to 26. We were able to DOUBLE our research program—in a pandemic no less—thanks to the generous support of New Harvest donors.

Without further ado…meet New Harvest’s 2020 cohort of cell ag pioneers!

Pet food might be the underdog of lab-grown meat, but Bond Pet Foods and Because Animals say the chances of scientific success and consumer acceptance increase when the stakes are lowered.

This summer, researchers at the University of Maribor in Slovenia will study how cells grow and survive in the prototype.

Stephanie Kawecki is a New Harvest Research Fellow pioneering a method for growing muscle and fat cells together at UCLA. Having previously interned at Beyond Meat, where she compared compounds in the company’s signature plant-based meat products to compounds in actual meat, Stephanie has experience in both the plant-based and cell-based meat industries.

Leila Strickland and Michelle Egger are on a mission to make something as digestible as human milk, but as practical as infant formula.

Inside New Harvest Fellow Cameron Semper’s project to culture fish cells without fetal bovine serum.

Exactly ten years later, the story of the paper that started it all.

In addition to being one of New Harvest’s first interns, Natalie Rubio is a New Harvest Research Fellow working on a PhD in Cellular Agriculture under Dr. David Kaplan at Tufts University. Before relocating to Boston for her PhD studies, Natalie got a taste of the San Francisco tech scene working at Quartzy, and she also helped out in the early days of Perfect Day Foods (then Muufri) while completing her B.S. in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. Read on to get to know Natalie!

The Shojinmeat Project is an inter-disciplinary collaborative project aimed at the development of cultured meat in Japan. The project consists of a number of volunteers working in a variety of “clusters” in both scientific and non-scientific subject areas, giving rise to the startup Integriculture Inc.

Erin had the opportunity to chat with Yuki Hanyu, founder of the Shojinmeat Project, about the history and vision behind the initiative. Yuki works full-time at the Shojinmeat Project and Integriculture Inc., and lives just south of Tokyo, Japan.

It’s been a couple of weeks since New Harvest 2016 – this is Erin’s “NH True Hollywood story” of how it all went down.

We often joked in the office that there was something very wedding-like about it, with all the prep, nerves, and the actual day being a dreamy blur. So this is my attempt to describe what the world’s first cellular agriculture conference was like, from my perspective.

Abi Glencross is a New Harvest Research Fellow and PhD student in London working to create “steak without cows.” Abi talks to us about the difficulties in growing muscle tissues larger than .5mm, designing bioreactors, and blurring the line between art and science.

On February 24, 2015 the cultured meat movement lost one of its pioneers, Willem Frederik van Eelen.

Andy Vrbicek suggests that the role of animal agriculture in climate change is vastly underestimated because of calculation parameters in this thought-provoking essay.

“Factory farming hasn’t been around for long, and I think we should be optimistic that it won’t be around much longer.” Ben Davidow is a 27-year old web developer living in San Francisco. He has been concerned about animal rights since becoming a vegetarian when he was 8 years-old and later reading Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. […]