Above: © doug coombe Photography
Sophia Lunt’s career in cancer research started with soap.“Soap is both polar and nonpolar, so it binds to nonpolar grease and also to polar water when you go to wash it away,” the Michigan State University chemist says, recalling a high school science lesson. “I thought that was really cool and wanted to learn more about molecules.”
Lunt attended Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania, and majored in chemistry. She graduated in 2005, and not long after started her PhD at Princeton University, eventually joining the lab of chemist Joshua Rabinowitz. There, she published research (under her maiden name Kwon) on how anti-metabolite drugs affect metabolism to stop bacterial growth.1
After earning her PhD in 2010, she wanted to connect chemistry to human disease, so she joined Matthew Vander Heiden’s cancer metabolism lab as a postdoc at MIT. Lunt was fascinated by the Warburg effect—the ...
