Cellular Agriculture Innovation Day 2025 Speaker Bios - Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President

Nicole Tichenor Blackstone

Nicole Tichenor Blackstone, Ph.D., M.S., is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Agriculture, Food, and Environment at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Dr. Blackstone’s research focuses on developing and evaluating strategies to improve food system sustainability. Her work fuses industrial ecology, nutrition, and social science methods. Dr. Blackstone currently leads projects on sustainable diets (The LASTING Project) and cellular agriculture. For the latter, she is PI on a project developing sustainable animal-free scaffolds 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 is the recipient of multiple fellowships, including the Switzer Environmental Leadership Fellowship. She has experience in food policy spanning the local to national levels, through previous positions with the Douglas County Food Policy Council in Kansas and National Family Farm Coalition. Dr. Blackstone holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies from the University of Kansas, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Nutrition from Tufts University.

Lily Fitzgerald

Lily Fitzgerald is the Senior Manager, Advanced Technology Programs at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, where she manages the Massachusetts Manufacturing Innovation Initiative (M2I2) and leads cluster development for bioindustrial manufacturing and additive manufacturing. Prior to joining MassTech, Lily spent seven years at Ginkgo Bioworks, where she worked as an early engineer in Ginkgo’s laboratories and later founded the Public Policy team, advocating for policies that grow the bioeconomy and innovation ecosystem. She has an M.S. in Technology Policy from MIT and a B.S. in Environmental Science from UMass Amherst.

Bruce Friedrich

Bruce is founder & President of the Good Food Institute, a global network of nonprofit science-focused think tanks with affiliates in the U.S., India, Israel, Brazil, Singapore, and Europe (UK, Germany, & EC). GFI works on alternative protein policy, science, and corporate engagement – to accelerate the production of plant-based and cultivated meat in order to bolster the global protein supply while mitigating climate change, reducing agricultural land use, reducing pandemic and AMR risk, and improving food security. Bruce has penned op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Nature Food and other publications, and has appeared on podcasts including Making Sense (Sam Harris), Ezra Klein, Outrage + Optimism, and others. Bruce is a TED fellow, American Food Hero (EatingWell Magazine 2021), and popular speaker about food technology. Bruce’s 2019 TED talk has been viewed more than 2.3 million times and translated into 30 languages.

Bruce graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law and also holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics.

Johannes Fruehauf

Dr. Johannes Fruehauf is a physician-scientist and life-science entrepreneur. He is the Founder and CEO of Biolabs and LabCentral, the national network for biotech incubators and the largest co-working spaces for life-science startup companies. Together, Biolabs/LabCentral have helped launch over 850 venture funded startup companies in the life sciences in 16 different cities and a presence in the US, Germany, France and Japan. The concept of these facilities is built around openness, transparency and shared resources and has changed the way biotech companies are built in the US. Companies launched at Biolabs/LabCentral have raised over $30bn in venture capital financing since 2010.
Dr. Fruehauf is a Founding General Partner at Mission BioCapital, an early stage venture capital fund providing capital to start-up companies in the life sciences.
He studied Medicine in Germany and France, while also conducting field work in Africa (Zimbabwe and Guinea). He graduated from the University of Frankfurt and received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. Dr. Fruehauf practiced medicine (internal medicine and OB/Gyn) for several years in Germany before coming to Boston for a post-doc at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School. He is an author of 30 peer reviewed articles in the medical literature and inventor on numerous issued and pending patents.

David Kaplan

David Kaplan is the Stern Family Endowed Professor of Engineering at Tufts University, a Distinguished University Professor, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering. His research focus is on biopolymer engineering, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and cellular agriculture. He has published over 1,000 peer reviewed papers, he is editor-in-chief of ACS Biomaterials Science and Engineering and he serves on many editorial boards and programs for journals and universities. He has received awards for his research and teaching and is an elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and the National Academy of Engineering.

Natalie Rubio

Natalie began working in the field in 2014, interning at New Harvest and Perfect Day Foods. After graduating with a B.S. Chemical & Biological Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder and spending a year working at Quartzy, she joined the Kaplan Lab to perform graduate research on cultured meat from novel species and completed her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering/Cellular Agriculture. She also served as an advisor for Bond Pet Foods and Matrix Foodtech and was the first employee at Ark Biotech where she led the Process Science team before re-joining Tufts.

Bill Shaw

Bill Shaw is the Vice Provost for Innovation at Tufts University. As the Vice Provost for Innovation, Bill is responsible for business development activities across the University with a particular focus on establishing strategic partnerships, cultivating entrepreneurship, enhancing the physical infrastructure and engaging the global innovation ecosystem. Bill also oversees several key programs including the Office of the Board of Advisors, Tufts Launchpad | Biolabs and Tufts Launchpad Accelerator.

Bill was previously the Executive Director of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, a Harvard-affiliated Medical School. The Martinos Center is one of the world’s premier research centers focused on biomedical imaging. Bill worked to create an environment where innovation thrives by bringing together the world’s leading scientists, business leaders and patients to solve important healthcare issues. He was responsible for the leadership of the Center and the administration of its $60+ million in research revenue. In addition, he spearheaded business development activities through establishing relationships with academic institutions, industry participants, philanthropic donors and government agencies. Bill is the founder of several start-up companies including Eikonizo Therapeutics, 149 Medical Inc. and BlinkAI Technologies.

Bill also possesses extensive experience in establishing international collaboration agreements with a focus on China and Japan. In 2017, he received the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship and spent time traveling through China exploring its innovation ecosystem.

Bill earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from WPI and a J.D. from the University of New Hampshire School of Law. He also studied Intellectual Property Law at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Bill recently finished a fellowship at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics where he focused on the ethical issues related to the interface of artificial intelligence, neuroscience and business. Bill is a member of the bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and is a registered patent attorney at the USPTO.

Steve Simitzis

Steve Simitzis is a Partner at Solvable Syndicate, which invests in early stage startups to accelerate transformation of our food system, focused on impact to planetary and human health. Solvable Syndicate invests across the food system, from supply chain SaaS and marketplaces, to alternative proteins, plant-based consumer products, and cellular agriculture. Before Solvable, Steve was Chief Marketing Officer at Wild Earth, and prior to that led incubation of consumer pet startups within Mars Petcare. Steve holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and began his career as a software engineer in the dot com era of Silicon Valley, and went on to become a serial founder with 3 exits. Besides early stage investing, he is an advisor and mentor to startups with the accelerators Brinc and Big Idea Ventures, and co-founded Cell Valley Labs, a food and biotech incubator in Berkeley, CA.

Andrew Stout

Andrew works to advance Tufts’ cellular agriculture technologies towards commercialization through the Tufts Cell Ag Commercialization Lab and associated spin-out Deco Labs, where he is the CSO. Andrew has a B.S. Material Science from Rice University (2015) and a Ph.D. Cellular Agriculture/Biomedical Engineering from Tufts University (2022) through the New Harvest Doctoral Fellowship. During graduate school, Andrew focused on cell line development, genetic engineering, and media formulation for cultivated meat. Prior to joining Tufts, Andrew worked at Maastricht University in Dr. Mark Post’s cultivated meat research group, and Geltor, Inc., a precision fermentation company making recombinant collagen and gelatin.

John Yuen Jr.

Originally from Hong Kong, John has engaged in significant work in the field of cultivated meat since 2017. This interest, ignited during undergraduate (Molecular Biology) and master’s (Biology) studies at the University of California, San Diego, spurred him to join the Kaplan Laboratory for a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering/Cellular Agriculture. His graduate research focused on developing economical methods for large-scale cultivated fat production. He also has experience in bone tissue engineering, programming, and venture capital.