161. (Holiday Replay) Leaf It to Science: How Foray Bioscience's Ashley Beckwith is Reforesting the Future

Episode notes

In this special holiday replay episode, we revisit our conversation with Ashley Beckwith, founder of Foray Biosciences, who shares her groundbreaking work in plant cell culture and tissue engineering. Growing up in Colorado, Ashley watched forests disappear to housing development and wildfire - experiences that sparked her lifelong mission to reimagine how we produce plant materials. After training as an engineer and working in medical device development, she pivoted to apply tissue engineering concepts to plants, initially exploring lab-grown wood before discovering a more fundamental problem: the lack of accessible, efficient plant cell culture processes. Today, Foray develops fabricated seeds for forest restoration, creates harvest-free plant products, and builds AI-powered tools to accelerate plant science R&D. Ashley explains why plant cells are the fundamental building blocks for everything from molecules to materials to entire ecosystems, and how her company is working to solve the seed shortage crisis that prevents us from restoring 94% of post-wildfire sites.

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