We’re #blessed to have Michael Selden join New Harvest as our intern this fall! Mike holds a degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Umass Amherst and has taught Chemistry to high schoolers as well as having worked in labs dealing with invasive fungi that threaten our food supply and the biomechanics of mantis shrimp and cancer biology.  As a lover of science and an environmentalist, Michael believes in using all of the technology that we have to help grow our food supply while shrinking our environmental impact. 

For our first donor profile in our Getting to Know series, we sat down with Joshua March, CEO and Founder of Conversocial, a provider of software which enables companies to deliver customer service in real time through social media. Josh is a longtime cultured meat enthusiast who became a donor and dedicated member of the New Harvest community after finding out about us in 2015.

The US Department of Agriculture is holding a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Biotechnology and 21st Century Agriculture (AC21) from September 8 - 9 in Washington, D.C.New Harvest has submitted a public comment on cellular agriculture to this meeting, which can be read in full below:

New Harvest's first grant recipient Abi Glencross (PhD candidate in cellular agriculture at King's College London) is receiving The King’s College Global Research Award! This is an opportunity for researchers to undertake research or work in order to develop international university partnerships. The awardees research aligns with one or more of the following global themes:Defence and SecurityGlobal HealthSustainable CitiesCulture & IdentityTo undertake this research, Abi will be crossing the pond to study under Dr. Andrew Pelling at the Pelling Lab in Ottawa, Canada in 2017! Abi describes what this work will entail in her entry for the New Harvest blog.

New Harvest Communications Director Erin explains some of the processes that fall under cellular agriculture in plain English. A version of this article was originally published in AgFunder in July 2016.

On July 14, 2016, New Harvest hosted the first invitation-only workshop for industry, academic and government stakeholders in cellular agriculture.

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.

We sent out a survey to everyone who attended our conference! Here are the results.

New Harvest is funding the first graduate student fellowship program for cellular agriculture research at Tufts University, and Natalie Rubio is the first grantee. Natalie Rubio will begin working in Professor David Kaplan's biomaterials-focused lab on August 1, 2016, funded by New Harvest through the New Harvest Cultured Tissue Fellowship.

At our conference last week, we used Sli.do instead of a more traditional Q&A session after each panel. Our hope was to encourage a more active and engaging dialogue between the audience and panelists. It was a huge success.The audience submitted questions via Sli.do on their phones/laptops, and the stream of questions was projected onto a screen for the speakers to see in real-time. The audience could upvote their favorite questions, which would then make their way to the top of the stream as they garnered more likes.

Isha's reflections on being invited to present to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the regulation of future products of biotechnology.

Rebecca Ruth Seidel is the dairy manager and cheesemaker of Wholesome Dairy Farms, a grazing operation in rural Pennsylvania. As a 4th generation dairy farmer, decade-long vegetarian, and former Penn State American Studies graduate student, she's interested in the intersection of animal ethics, scientific progress, and the American diet. Rebecca shares her perspective on cellular agriculture as a current dairy farmer in her first guest post for the New Harvest blog.

New Harvest has been invited to participate in an incredible opportunity to shape U.S. regulatory policy for biotechnology products.

Marianne Ellis is a Biochemical Engineer at the University of Bath with expertise in integrated bioprocess design for large-scale cell culture. Her work involves the design and fabrication of the bioreactors in which cultured meat cells grow!

Leading Avian Tissue Researcher Begins Research On The Production of Chicken Meat without Chickens

New Harvest is supporting a foundational cultured avian tissue research project for the purpose of creating chicken and turkey meat without animals at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State University. The project is led by Dr. Paul Mozdziak, an expert in animal cell culture techniques, transgenic animal production, and muscle biology. He is assisted by graduate student Marie Gibbons. New Harvest’s financial support to the team at NCSU will total $118,800, provided over 2 years.

Daan Luining is one of only a handful of cultured meat researchers in the world. He spent the first year of his Masters program working in Dr. Mark Post’s lab (Maastricht University, The Netherlands). Now, Daan is completing the MBA portion of his degree in New York; using his expertise to implement scientific strategy for New Harvest.