Anush Chiappino-Pepe
Collaborator
Email: anushchp (at) mit (dot) edu

Anush (she/her/hers) grew up in the Canary Islands (Spain) daughter of immigrant parents (Argentinians). She hence considers herself a Hispanic/Latina. With 11 years old, Anush was selected to participate at the Program of Detection and Stimulation of Precocious Talent in Mathematics (ESTALMAT) by the Real Academy of Exact, Physical, and Natural Sciences in Spain. She later achieved the best GPA of the State and the University Entrance Exam. Her passion for biochemical systems and mathematics motivated her to study Chemical Engineering. She received her Diploma in Chemical Engineering (equivalent to a Master of Engineering degree) from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Spain, in 2013 – this included an exchange year at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. She first combined math and biology in research in 2012, when she worked as an ERASMUS intern researcher at the Vienna University of Technology (TUW), Austria.

Anush obtained her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. During her Ph.D., Anush modeled the metabolism of malaria parasites and identified essential metabolic pathways for the survival of Plasmodium parasites in their liver development – in collaboration with the Universities of Bern and Geneva (Switzerland), Leiden (the Netherlands), and the Sanger Institute (UK). She won the 2016 Excellence Teaching Award by the EPFL Chemistry and Chemical Engineering section and the 2019 Annual Jeffrey Hubbell and Melody Swartz Young Bioengineer Award.

Since 2019, Anush is a Postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor George M Church at Harvard Medical School. Since 2020, Anush is also a research affiliate in the laboratory of Professor Gregory Stephanopoulos, where she is developing molecule feeding strategies to achieve desired phenotypes. In 2021, Anush was selected as an MIT ChemE Rising Star.