Josephine Krepps

I’ve been on two projects in tissue engineering and cultivated meat. As an undergraduate at Lehigh University, I worked under Dr. Kelly Schultz and Dr. Mark Snyder on a GFI-supported project using hydrogels as cell-degradable scaffolds. I utilized hydrogel geometry to cue mesenchymal stem cells to differentiate to muscle cells, a low-cost tool important for culturing differentiated tissue at scale. As a graduate student at Penn State, I work under Dr. Josephine Wee using fungal biomaterials for cultivated meat. In this work, I use fungal mycelium scaffolds to support cell growth and differentiation. Our lab has aspirations in expanding our cell bank to chicken, porcine, quail, and bovine cells to study how fungal mycelium can bring low-cost, sustainable cultivated meat to market.