Student-run Nonprofit Nucleate Cultivate Expands Cultivate Tomorrow Hackathon to Schools Beyond the US

Registration is open until November 10th for students to take part in the hackathon, get mentored by industry leaders, and apply their knowledge and skills to reimagine the future of food.

Boston, MA, October 18 — After last year’s inaugural Cultivate Tomorrow Hackathon event, which invited students from academic institutions across the US to design creative solutions for the cellular agriculture industry, the competition is now open to students from around the globe. With partners at Cell Ag Australia, Cell Ag Netherlands, Cell Ag France, Wageningen Alt Protein, and many other supporting organizations, the Cultivate team hopes to open the door to cellular agriculture for more students.

The Cultivate Tomorrow Hackathon places undergraduate and graduate students in multidisciplinary teams to design creative solutions to some of the most critical hurdles faced by the industry. Each team will work together with an industry mentor to focus on one of the competition's two tracks:

1. Advertising. The Advertising Track tasks teams with taking the perspective of a company selling a sustainable future food product. Teams will be expected to prepare a low-fidelity version of an advertising campaign that improves the perception of cultivated or precision fermentation-based products, presents the scientific concepts behind them, and excites the general public about the prospect of these new options.
2. Underutilized Resource & Novel Technology. Teams in the Underutilized Resource Track will be tasked with identifying and evaluating a novel technology or resource that can drastically improve the state of R&D for animal cell culture or precision fermentation processes. They will produce a proposal of an underutilized resource that can help with cost reduction, quality improvement, environmental footprint, increase in process efficiency, or diversification of cultivated food products. Teams will choose a resource of interest and develop a research proposal that outlines the different experimental steps they would need to take to evaluate and validate this resource.

As part of the competition, exclusive seminars and talks from industry and technical experts will be provided to give participants a rounded view and additional insight into the possibilities and challenges of the cellular agriculture sector. Teams are expected to conduct appropriate research and compose reports detailing their efforts and findings that will be presented to peers and judges.

"This program fosters creativity, problem-solving, and out-of-the-box thinking that will aid in societal understanding, development, and integration of cell-based products," says Jasmin Kern, founder and director of the Hackathon.

Made possible by Milipore Sigma’s Innovation Center, Aleph Farms, and New Harvest, among other supporters, this year's Cultivate Tomorrow Hackathon will not only a award the winning teams of each track with a $2000 cash prize, but also the teams with the most disruptive tech solution and most creative and original advertising campaign.

For more information, please visit the Cultivate Tomorrow website.

About Cultivate Tomorrow
Cultivate Tomorrow Hackathon is an annual competition in which student teams work on some of the most pressing problems in the cellular agriculture industry. Accepted participants are placed in teams and matched with industry mentors who help guide the team's work. The hacking period takes place over a period three months before the final presentations and award ceremony. Cultivate Tomorrow is the flagship program of Nucleate Cultivate.

About Nucleate Cultivate
Nucleate Cultivate is an affiliate of Nucleate, a free and collaborative national student-run non-profit organization that facilitates the formation of life sciences companies, critical thinking in the life sciences, and education and research opportunities focused on life science and engineering applications.