Company: Seed Health
Title: Co-founder & Co-CEO
Industry: Consumer products
Hometown:Â New York City
Notable in 2023: Led microbial innovations for plastic waste, carbon sequestration, and honeybee immunity.
While Ara Katz is not a scientist herself, the co-founder and co-CEO of Seed Health understands how human lives and the living world are intertwined. Seed Health studies the microbiome and develops probiotics, which are sold direct to consumers. She's also the co-founder of SeedLabs, the company's environmental division, which is funded by Seed Health profits.
"It's a one-health ethos: if you're looking at human health, you need to zoom out and ask, what does that mean for the environment?" Katz told The Quality Edit. "What does that mean for the world? And what does that mean for where we're spending our dollars?"
I don’t like the term ‘success.’ It implies finality that has always felt misleading. We all live many lives, the experience of each compounding on the next. The attachment to a singular end-state defined by a milestone in a career seriously misses greater existential truths for me that are more interested in experimentation, iteration, and circularity.Ara KatzCo-founder & Co-Chief Executive Officer, Seed Health
The climate change crisis has cost the world $391 million per day over the last two decades, according to a study in Nature Communications. In the U.S. alone, 28 extreme climate and weather events that occurred in 2023 each cost at least $1 billion, a record.Â
Bacteria may hold more answers for everyone and everything.
One of SeedLabs' recent projects developed probiotics for honeybees. About half the honeybee colonies in the United States died in 2022. According to a study in The ISME Journal, SeedLabs discovered that giving 30 honeybee hives in California this treatment reduced pathogens, reduced levels of fungi, provided nutrition and helped larval bee offspring survive.
Another SeedLabs initiative in conjunction with MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Weill Cornell Medicine, and Harvard Medical School created a way for bacteria to decompose plastic and rebuild new molecules that could be reused to create new plastic products. The bacteria is currently being tested on the International Space Station.
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