"The Great Debate: Meat Consumption"
Speaker Bios
Sean B. Cash is an economist with the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. His research focuses on consumer behavior around food and nutrition and economic aspects of agriculture, food and the environment. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, abstracts, book chapters and reports and has been the Principal or Co-Investigator on over $22 million of research funding. His work has been funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Agriculture and Agri-food Canada, and Newman’s Own Foundation, among other sources. At Tufts, he teaches courses in agricultural and environmental economics, consumer behavior around sustainability, statistics, and corporate social responsibility. He has been involved extensively in policy and public-facing work, including testimony to the Canadian Parliament and service on a National Academy of Sciences panel on invasive species impacts of food trade. His work includes research on consumer interest in cellular agriculture products; consumer response to food labeling; environmental impacts in food and beverage production, including projects on coffee and tea quality and climate change; and measuring the sustainability of dietary patterns.
Bre Duffy, PhD is the US director of responsible research and innovation at New Harvest, a global nonprofit focused on maximizing the positive impacts of cellular agriculture. She holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from Tufts University where she studied tissue engineering. At New Harvest, Dr. Duffy works with the organization’s network of researchers and diverse stakeholders to promote pre-commercial research and foster collaboration across the field to ensure future products will be safe, sustainable, and equitable.
Shibani Ghosh is a public health nutritionist with over 20 years of experience working in the Middle East, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. She is the Associate Director for the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Nutrition and a Research Associate Professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University. Her research interests include examining malnutrition in all its forms, formulating and implementing evidence based interventions targeting nutritionally disadvantaged populations and translation of innovative basic and clinical sciences research into applied community based research. Specifically, she works on understanding the agriculture-nutrition linkages, examining biological determinants of stunting, diet and other non-diet determinants of stunting in infants and young children and testing interventions to improve maternal and infant nutrition and growth.
Andrew Stout, PhD is an Entrepreneur in Residence at the newly formed Tufts University Cell Ag Development Lab, which aims to develop and de-risk cellular agriculture technologies for real-world application. Andrew earned his PhD from Tufts under Dr. David Kaplan, where he studied cell line engineering and media development for cultured meat. Prior to Tufts, Andrew joined the field of cellular agriculture as a student researcher in Dr. Mark Post's cultured meat lab in 2013, when the lab produced the world's first cell-cultured hamburger. He is deeply interested in cell line development to make cultured meat products affordable, scalable, and healthy.
Nicole Tichenor Blackstone is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Agriculture, Food, and Environment at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Her research focuses on developing and evaluating strategies to improve food system sustainability. Dr. Blackstone’s work fuses industrial ecology, nutrition, and social science methods. To date, her research has explored the environmental and social implications of diverse production systems (e.g., grass-fed beef, cultivated meat, fruits and vegetables), human diets, and regional food systems. Currently, she leads the Leading a Sustainability Transition in Nutrition Globally (LASTING) Project, which aims to produce evidence-based recommendations, methods, and metrics for integrated sustainability assessment of dietary patterns. On LASTING, she is co-leading integrated modeling of dietary sustainability outcomes. Dr. Blackstone is also a founding affiliated faculty member of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture. She is PI on a project developing sustainable animal-free scaffolds for cultivated meat and Co-PI on a large, interdisciplinary project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, leading the project’s environmental assessment team.
Dr. Blackstone earned her Ph.D. and M.S. from the Friedman School in the Agriculture, Food, and Environment program. During her graduate training, she was the recipient of multiple fellowships, including the Switzer Environmental Leadership Fellowship. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies from the University of Kansas. Dr. Blackstone also has experience in food policy spanning the local to national levels, through previous positions with the Douglas County Food Policy Council (KS) and National Family Farm Coalition. She collaborates across disciplines and with stakeholders to co-create more equitable, just, and sustainable food systems.