Fast forward after two internships with the nonprofit, and Halioua was convinced the study of aging was the field she wanted to pursue permanently. “It just made so much sense,” she told Wired in October 2022. “I very quickly knew that this was a hundred percent where I was going to spend my life.” After impressing an Oxford researcher involved with the SENS Research Foundation, she was offered the chance to move to the UK. That experience quickly soured after realizing that her admiration for the foundation was quickly disappearing. In the past years, she publicly outed the foundation’s co-founder and mastermind Aubrey de Grey for encouraging her to sleep with potential donors to raise more funds (an accusation Grey has denied). In 2018, Halioua was in search of something new. She contacted a leading woman in aging treatments, the child prodigy who had enrolled in MIT at 14, Laura Deming. Deming was running a venture capital fund for age-related startups in San Francisco. After impressing Deming in a phone interview, Halioua was offered a short but impactful two-week internship at WeWork in San Francisco. After her brief internship, Halioua was offered a job and the opportunity to simultaneously finish her Ph.D. at Oxford. But soon after, she was dealing with an investigation at the university due to a formal complaint she had filed against her supervisor regarding bullying and harassment. Overwhelmed by the investigation, her studies, and her work, she left Oxford to focus on her passion.
Halioua’s interest in biotechnology has led her to unraveling and developing therapeutics for pathological aging
326
Powered by FlippingBook