Isha Datar

Executive Director of New Harvest

Isha Datar is the executive director of New Harvest, a nonprofit dedicated to ending our dependence on industrial livestock production by growing foods like meat, milk and eggs from cells instead of animals. After publishing one of the first papers to discuss cultured meat in academic literature, she coined the term "cellular agriculture" to create a new category for agricultural products produced from cell cultures rather than whole plants and animals. In 2014, Datar cofounded two of the world's first cellular agriculture companies: Perfect Day Foods (formerly Muufri) and The Every Company (formerly Clara Foods). She promptly donated all of her founding equity to New Harvest to establish a public endowment for cell ag research. Now, she works to accelerate scientific breakthroughs and steward cultured meat such that it serves the public good.

Mark Post

Professor at Maastricht University

CSO of Mosa Meat and Qorium

Dr Mark Post, MD/PhD, has had several academic appointments at Utrecht University, Harvard University, Dartmouth college, Eindhoven University of Technology and Maastricht University. He currently is professor of Sustainable Industrial Tissue Engineering at Maastricht University. He is visiting professor at Harvard, University of Modena and faculty at Singularity University. His main research interest is the engineering of tissues for various applications. Tissue engineering for Food has led to the development of cultured beef from bovine skeletal muscle stem cells. The same technology is used to culture leather. Dr Post co-authored 200 papers in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals and coordinated several national consortia with funding and awards from different sources including government, charity and industry. He is a frequent speaker at international events on innovation in the agrifood sector. He presented the world’s first hamburger from cultured beef in the August 2013 for which he received the World Technology Award from AAAS/Times/Forbes. Dr Post is CSO and co-founder of Mosa Meat and of Qorium, two companies that aim to commercialize meat and leather applications of tissue engineering. Together, these companies have 170 employees, 105 of whom are scientists.

Vítor Espírito Santo

Senior Director of Cellular Agriculture at Good Meat

Vitor Espirito Santo is a biomedical engineer with 15 years of international professional experience in the fields of biotechnology, tissue engineering, stem cells, regenerative medicine and cellular agriculture. He holds a MSc (2007) in Biomedical Engineering from Univ. of Minho (Portugal) and a PhD (2012) in Tissue Engineering, Regenerative Medicine, and Stem cells at 3B’s Research Group at Univ. of Minho (Portugal) in collaboration with Kyoto Univ. (Japan). Vitor worked in the industrial biotechnology space at iBET, Immunocore, and AbbVie developing in vitro cancer cell models for improved drug discovery before moving into the cellular agriculture industry over 5 years ago. Vitor is currently the Senior Director of Cellular Agriculture at Good Meat, a sub-division of Eat Just, a Silicon Valley based company dedicated to the production of cultivated meat. His team is responsible for the R&D program involving the sourcing, selection, and optimization of animal cells for manufacturing of cultivated meat. Eat Just received the first and only worldwide regulatory approval of cultivated chicken meat in 2020 in Singapore and more recently also received the “no questions letter” from FDA for production of cultivated chicken in the United States.

Andrew Stout

Entrepeneur in Residence at Tufts University

Andrew Stout is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Tufts University's cell ag development labs, where he leads upstream research activities to develop and de-risk cultured meat technologies for real-world application. Andrew received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Tufts in 2022 as a New Harvest Fellow in Dr. David Kaplan's lab, where he focused on cell line engineering and serum free media development for cultured meat. Prior to Tufts, Andrew entered the field of cultured meat in 2013 as a student researcher in Dr. Mark Post's lab at Maastricht University, and subsequently worked on the strain development team at Geltor, Inc., a San Francisco based company focusing on producing recombinant collagen and gelatin.