Katie Noble

Katie is a United Nations GEO-7 Fellow and PhD Researcher at SEI York and the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York.

Her research analyses potential future pathways for environmental and socio-cultural outcomes of scaling-up the cellular agriculture industry. Humans have now modified vast quantities of the Earth’s land surface to produce food, with over 75% of all agricultural land being used for meat and milk production. This over-exploitation has wrought a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

In the face of global biodiversity and climate crises, growing meat in bioreactors is a potential solution for meeting the global demand for meat products whilst negating the multifaceted welfare issues inherent in our current system. Cultured meat has the potential to be a radically disruptive technology, capable of entirely reshaping current food production systems.

Katie’s research adopts a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to analysing the social, cultural and environmental dimensions of cultured meat, incorporating methodologies and ideas from natural and social sciences. The thesis aims to generate knowledge useful to both industry stakeholders and policymakers regarding the optimisation of cultured meat production systems and supply chains for increased sustainability and global social equity outcomes.