Isha Datar

Isha Datar is redefining how we perceive meat production. With sustainability being a hot topic, she is the ideal speaker for your event, capable of captivating audiences with her innovative ideas. Isha isn't promoting veganism, but revolutionising meat production to cater to all of humanity while ensuring the nutrition standard we are already used to. Unique in her approach, she has spent over a decade developing "vitro-meat", a more sustainable option for consumers.

Since 2009, she has been at the forefront of cellular agriculture. When Isha noticed that the field of research was lacking funding, not interest or knowledge, she advocated for more support in the essential fight against climate change. Now a thriving industry, she uses researchers, investors and experts to create replicate animal meat in a lab. A year after she began her life's work, Isha was published in the food science journal Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies, titled Possibilities for an In-Vitro Meat Production System.

Isha is responsible for bringing together academics, non-profits, companies and researchers through her role as Policy and Public Affairs at GlaxoSmithKline. She valued the relationship between these experts, to transfer what she had created in a lab to the mass public. In 2013, she became the Executive Director of New Harvest, a research institute on cellular agriculture. She has since expanded the business to include animal products like eggs and milk, which she created through biotechnology.

With Isha's help, New Harvest have founded two start-ups, Perfect Day and Clara Foods. Perfect Day has produced cow-free milk using biotechnology. Since 2014, they have produced a synthetic biology accelerator program in Ireland, where they use two main proteins to recreate milk. Similarly, Clara Foods has created a cholesterol-free and salmonella-free chicken-less egg. While studying for a degree in Cell & Molecular Biology from the University of Alberta, Isha contributed to Canada's first cultured meat laboratory, sparking her interest in cellular agriculture. After learning of the environmental impact that meat production has, she has dedicated her life to tissue engineering technology. In 2012, Isha gave a TEDxToronto talk on cultured meat, a video that has been viewed thousands of times.