Chinyere Ukeje won the $300,000 top prize in NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table, in winners published September 24, 2026.
She is 25. She took a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, she is working on a master’s in computer science at Johns Hopkins, and she lives in Northeast Philadelphia with her husband. She grew up in Bowie, Maryland and spent her high school years in Nigeria. Her family is Igbo.
Her design is called ANI, for Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure, and the name is not an acronym somebody reverse engineered afterward. Ani is the Igbo earth goddess of harvest and fertility.
ANI is built to make half of what a Mars crew eats without anything arriving from Earth. It stacks three systems together: controlled environment agriculture, fermentation and fungi cultivation, and closed loop nutrient recycling run through bioreactors. A limited store of food carried from Earth covers the rest. Fifty percent is not a modest target on a planet where a resupply ship takes months.
Second place and $200,000 went to Cislune of Rosemead, California. Three $50,000 category awards went to teams in Hilo, Evansville and Bentonville, and an international award went to a team in Belgium. The pool was $650,000 in total, and her share was the largest single piece of it. On NASA’s own list of winners she is named by her own name. Every other winner is named as a team or a company.
What she said about the problem is the part worth sitting with.
“The problem of feeding astronauts on Mars is more than just growing crops,” she said.
“You want them to feel at home when they are millions of miles from home.”
That is a systems engineer’s answer and a cook’s answer arriving in the same breath. Calories keep a body running. Food that tastes like where you came from keeps a person whole. She designed for both, and then she named the thing after a harvest goddess out of her own family’s language, which tells you she was never only solving for yield.
“I completely poured myself into this project,” she said.
Jennifer Edmunson, program manager for Centennial Challenges at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, described the competition as work the future of human space exploration will rely on.
A computer science student answered a food question and won on it. Nobody told her those two things belonged together.
