Our Team

The people behind TUCCA’s computational and cellular agriculture research at Tufts University.

Director, TUCCA · Stern Family Endowed Professor of Engineering, Tufts University

David Kaplan is the Stern Family Endowed Professor of Engineering at Tufts University, a Distinguished University Professor, a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the Director of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA). His research focus is on biopolymer engineering, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and cellular agriculture. He has published over 1,000 peer reviewed papers, he is editor-in-chief of ACS Biomaterials Science and Engineering and he serves on many editorial boards and programs for journals and universities. He has received awards for his research and teaching and is an elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, and the National Academy of Engineering.

Research Technician, Kaplan Lab @ TUCCA · Computational biology, bioinformatics & Cell Ag × AI

Benji Bromberg is a Research Technician in the Kaplan Lab at TUCCA, where he has worked since 2022 and leads the lab’s work at the intersection of cellular agriculture and AI. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Tufts, where his coursework concentrated on machine learning, computer vision, and computational biology, built on a foundation of probability, statistics, and algorithms. He began in the wet lab (cell line development across mammalian, teleost, avian, and crustacean species) and has since moved into computational biology and bioinformatics, building and maintaining the reproducible pipelines and machine-learning tools behind the lab’s computational research. He founded TUCCA’s GitHub organization to centralize that work and maintains CAAIL, the Cellular Agriculture AI Library. Benji earned his B.A. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Lewis & Clark College in 2022.

Software Engineer, Google · CAAIL co-creator

Jim Plotts is a software engineer at Google who is pursuing Tufts’ Certificate in Cellular Agriculture and co-created CAAIL, the Cellular Agriculture AI Library. He brings the software-engineering and applied-AI side of the project, with interests spanning large language models and retrieval-augmented generation, including co-authored work on graph-guided RAG for exploratory data analysis. At TUCCA he helps shape the tooling and AI methodology that connect modern machine learning to cellular agriculture research.

Postdoctoral Researcher, Kaplan Lab @ TUCCA · Protein design & molecular dynamics

Disheng (Dee) Lee is a postdoctoral researcher in the Kaplan Lab at TUCCA, where his work centers on generative protein design and molecular dynamics for cellular agriculture. He earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2024, and his computational approach to protein and peptide engineering supports the design of cell-ag-relevant biomolecules.

BME Ph.D. Candidate, Kaplan Lab @ TUCCA · Transcriptomics & omics

Ellie Contreras is a biomedical engineering Ph.D. candidate in the Kaplan Lab at TUCCA. She is the first author of the lab’s comparative transcriptomics (AST) study of chicken fibroblast adaptation for cultivated meat, and her work is expanding into additional omics projects.

BME Ph.D. Student, Kaplan Lab @ TUCCA · Protein design & molecular dynamics

Dylan Hendrixson is a biomedical engineering Ph.D. student in the Kaplan Lab at TUCCA, where his work centers on computational protein design and molecular dynamics for cellular agriculture. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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