A Taste of Mars: Chinyere “Chi-Chi” Ukeje ‘19 Wins NASA’s $300,000 Top Prize

It started with a burrito. Chinyere “Chi-Chi” Ukeje ‘19 was reading Project Hail Mary, the Andy Weir sci-fi novel, when the main character sat down to eat aboard his spacecraft. “I’d never thought about astronauts eating in space,” she says. She went looking for an answer and tumbled down a rabbit hole that ended with a NASA competition and, not long after, a decision: “I was like, what the heck. I’m just gonna try my hand.”

That try just won her the top $300,000 prize in NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table.  Chi-Chi took first place out of 113 submissions from teams across 33 countries and 28 states. And here’s the part that still makes our jaws drop: Chi-Chi did it entirely on her own. “It took so much energy and time, and I had a very specific vision,” she says. “It just felt best that I did it myself.”

The challenge was deceptively simple to describe and fiendishly hard to solve. An earlier NASA competition had produced all sorts of clever, standalone space-food technologies, did didn’t provide a way to connect them. This time NASA asked solvers to design a complete system to feed a 15-person crew on Mars for roughly 500 days: growing the food, cooking it, storing it, and tying every piece together. “What are all the things you have to think about that connect an entire food-production system?” she says. “That was the problem.”

Her answer is ANI (pronounced “Annie”) and is named for the Nigerian goddess of harvest and fertility.  ANI stands for “Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure.” Chi-Chi noticed NASA leans heavily on Greek mythology for nomenclature and wanted something from her own culture instead. “Ani just fit so perfectly, in every way.” The system blends controlled-environment agriculture, fermentation, fungi cultivation, and closed-loop recycling through bioreactors to produce about half the crew’s food off-Earth.

Ask which part she’s the proudest of, and she lights up about the meal production.  Her “meal cube,” is a portable, electric lunch box that allows crew members to heat a meal without trekking back to the kitchen. “It mirrors the way I meal prep in my own life,” she laughs, “connecting all these different things like lettuce and salad and chicken into one meal.” The toughest piece? The bioreactor. “I’m not a bioreactor engineer. I had to go from scratch on the research. Even now I couldn’t say I’m bioreactor-certified.”

Chi-Chi had received notice that she was a “winner,” but she didn’t know what placement or even if she won a prize and hadn’t really given it much more thought.  She was driving from Philadelphia to Maryland to visit her family when the announcement email landed (she opened it at a stop sign.). “The first line was the prize:  $300,000. I was just screaming,” she said through a huge smile.

The path to her win wasn’t a straight shot of certainty. Chi-Chi came to Indian Creek after time in Nigeria, feeling behind her classmates in exactly the subject she loved most. After one rough computer science class, she walked up to her teacher, Mr. McNally, and asked him point-blank whether she should even stay in the field. He didn’t tell her what to do; he just told her to keep at it, and that she’d get it. “And I did eventually get it,” she says. “I thought about those words after the win. If he’d told me to get out of computer science, I think I would have.”  She went on to earn her computer science degree from the University of Maryland in 2023 and is now at Johns Hopkins with PhD applications underway.

Chi-Chi’s advice to her younger Creek self is tender, and not about science at all. “Just try a little harder, socially. Everybody was so kind to me, but I felt like I was in my own little world. It wasn’t until I left that I truly appreciated how much was put into me and how loved I was. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and make connections with the people who are trying to connect with you.”

From a throwaway detail in a sci-fi novel to a system that could one day feed astronauts on Mars, Chi-Chi turned a passing “huh, I wonder” into $300,000 and a place in NASA’s history.  There’s no wondering why we’re so proud of Chi-Chi and all our Creek Alumni!