Cultivate 2026

09.30 Arrive/coffee

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10.00 Welcome

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10.15 - 11.15 Presentations

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10.15: Ben Dages - Edible Encapsulated Fibres for the Scalable Production of Cultivated Meat

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10.35: Lead Duggan and Travis Callue - A hand-built laboratory system for democratisation of cellular agriculture

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10.55: Neil Stephens - Respect Farms: a sociological reflection in building cultivated meat facilities in agricultural settings

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11.15 Break

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11.45 - 12.45 STEM panel: Looking ten years back, ten years forward

Panellists:

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Marianne Ellis is Professor of Bioprocess at the University of Bath. She is also Director of the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub (CARMA), a £12m investment in cellular agriculture from the EPSRC. She is also founder and CTO at Cellular Agriculture Ltd, working on scalable bioreactors and bioprocesses for cellular agriculture. 

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James Henstock is Associate Professor of Musculoskeletal Tissue Engineering at Northumbria University in Newcastle. In 2021 he joined Vow in Sydney as Senior Scientist, helping develop the product now sold as Forged in Singapore and Australia. In 2023 he returned to academia and now leads research into new technologies and commercial applications that unlock the potential of cellular agriculture.

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Eirini Theodosiou is Senior Lecturer in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at Aston University, where she leads a team working on scaffolds and microcarriers for cultivated meat. She is also engaged in developing educational tools for cellular agriculture in the UK. 

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12.45 Lunch

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13.45 - 14.45 Presentations

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13.45: William Gordon-Petrovskii - Scalable media development: Development of novel serum-free formulations for cultivated muscle production

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14.05: Christian Harrison - From Pint to Plate: Brewery Waste-Derived Bacterial Cellulose as a Cellular Scaffold for Cultivated Meat 

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14.25: Lensa Jotte - “It Will Happen Anyway!” – The Illusion of Choice and Cultured Meat: Focus groups with UK publics 

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14.45 Break

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15.15 - 16.15 Social Sciences panel: People and politics in cellular agriculture 

Panellists: 

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Vesco Paskalev is Senior Lecturer at The University of Law, Bloomsbury, London. He is currently working on Participatory Regulation of cultured meat. His expertise is in law and governance of new technologies, environmental law and policy, with a background in law and GM foods.

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Jason Thomas is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Aston University, interested in biopsychological aspects of human eating behaviour. He has conducted research on people’s responses to cultivated meat in the UK. 

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Neil Stephens is Associate Professor in Technology and Society at the University of Birmingham. He has been researching the cultural politics of cultured meat since 2008, and is part of the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub (CARMA). 

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16.15 End

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