By Mark Gargarian
Noubar and Anna Afeyan first met in 1986 at an American Chemical Society meeting in Anaheim, California. Noubar was an MIT graduate student, and Anna was visiting from Sweden on business for Alfa Laval, a multinational corporation. Both were trained biochemical engineers, and a mutual acquaintance introduced them to discuss one of Noubar’s projects. Their chemistry would soon catalyze into marriage, but few could have predicted the extraordinary journey ahead.
Today, Noubar is most well-known for co-founding Moderna, the pharmaceutical powerhouse behind the life-saving mRNA vaccine widely disseminated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Opportunities to impact lives on that scale are rare, but Noubar and Anna are no strangers to pushing the boulder of progress. The couple has been a force for positive change in all their endeavors, from their partnerships across the non-profit sector to their philanthropy platform, the Afeyan Foundation, which has generously supported the Children of Armenia Fund’s (COAF) mission to expand opportunities for Armenian youth. For the Afeyans, science entrepreneurship and charitable pursuits inspire equal dedication, drawing from the same well of values that water the roots of everything they do.
While Noubar and Anna are both scientists and immigrants to the United States, these similarities are contrasted by prominent differences in their formative beginnings. Anna, born Anna Gunnarson, was raised in Sweden to first-generation college graduates. “My dad ended up being a lawyer–his dad was a blacksmith. My mom ended up a high school teacher–her dad was a snowplow driver,” Anna explains. For her, it is a point of pride that, in Sweden, high-quality education is accessible to the general public with relative parity in quality. Reflecting on her family history, Anna contends, “These stories show that Education is what takes you places, and how important that is–how you can change your trajectory if you have a good education. That was always very important in our family. I think that’s a similarity to Armenians.”
Noubar was raised with his two brothers in Lebanon, descended from Armenian Genocide survivors. His mother studied piano at the Paris Conservatory and taught lessons in Beirut. His father’s family had initially escaped the Genocide in Anatolia for Bulgaria, but the dire state of life under communism led the family to flee again, this time to Lebanon. In Beirut, Noubar’s father found success importing and exporting plastics across the Middle East, before geopolitics intervened again in the form of the Lebanese Civil War. Noubar was 13 years old when his parents packed their bags yet again for Montreal, Canada.
War brings many reasons for emigration, but for the Afeyans, one stood out. “We left Lebanon fairly early at the start of the Civil War, because my Dad thought it would severely impact the education of his three teenage sons. He made a big sacrifice in leaving the relative ease of earning a living he had in Lebanon,” reflects Noubar. “We ended up going to Montreal, where he started all over again.”
Starting from zero is, for Noubar, a characteristic of the Armenian experience. He also considers it a valuable memory that would prepare him for life as an entrepreneur. Noubar made his first investment pitch on the Tuesday directly following Black Monday, the infamous October 1987 stock market crash. “There was this once-in-a-generation event where the stock market dropped by about fifty percent, and I was a twenty-five-year-old recent PhD graduate of MIT, and I had no idea why that should matter.” Noubar explains that, at the time, start-ups were expected from well-established American men deep into middle age, not young immigrant college graduates. Suddenly, he was asking for funding while the alarm bells flashed red. “Investors were completely devastated, and that cast a long shadow. But that ruinous moment was useful, because while it makes things tougher for you, it makes it even tougher for people who are less convinced about what they’re working on.”
That initial pitch in 1987 would be the first in a long career in which Noubar would help found over seventy life science companies, including his greatest success, Moderna. “We had spent 10 years developing a platform and very carefully demonstrating all the new things that mRNA could do. Then, suddenly, Covid presented as an infectious disease of unknown severity.” In 2020, Noubar remembers watching the international health organizations activate, one by one, and realizing that this virus was different. “We thought this could be the big one, so our team just basically went into the lab and designed the first construct of the vaccine literally within hours. We could do that because we had spent so much time and money developing a robust platform to do this type of science.“ What unfolded was like nothing else in Noubar’s career–watching the trials return with effective rates of 94%, working with the United States military, and receiving phone calls from world leaders. “It’s remarkable how people get your cell phone, if they need to. I was getting calls from various government heads, from global church heads, from various kings. Quite remarkable.”
While Noubar pursued science entrepreneurship, Anna focused her energies on raising their large family and championing science education, holding strong to the Swedish values at the roots of her upbringing. For over twenty years, Anna has supported foundations and schools around the world to expand STEM accessibility and equity. Currently, Anna serves on the board of Beacon Academy in Boston, preparing motivated students from communities with limited resources to succeed in competitive high schools, colleges, and careers. “They want to learn, they want to move places. But, as we know, in Boston education is not the same for all.”
Anna is not a typical trustee in that she came to the board via the classroom. “I became friends with someone who was working there, and they lost their science teacher, and she said, ‘Can you jump in and do it for a semester or so?’ I ended up doing it for 8 years.” Anna’s robust chemical engineering background and passion for student advocacy equipped her to assume teaching responsibilities. This experience informs Anna’s perspective on the challenges, stakes, and rewards of enhancing STEM equity in Armenia.
Together, Noubar and Anna are deeply involved in securing a better future for Armenia. Since 2000, the Afeyans have engaged in an astonishing scope of Armenian development work. Noubar explains, “We co-founded a number of socio-economic development projects, including an eco-tourism cluster near Tatev Monastery in the south of Armenia, an international school in Dilijan, healthcare projects, science/technology projects, and others.”
Anna jumps in, reflecting on their foundation’s recently announced launch of the Afeyan Initiatives for Armenia (AIFA). “We are doing so many projects in Armenia that we decided to set up an on-the-ground organization.” After the recent capture of Artsakh by Azerbaijan, the Afeyans committed two million dollars to support the displaced Armenian refugees, including grants to COAF. Noubar was honored by COAF in 2015 with a Save the Generation Award at its 12th Annual Holiday Gala. Recently, the Afeyans also launched the Armenian Spiritual Revival Foundation to address mental health traumas produced by the war and its consequences. “COAF really fits in well, because it’s young people. It’s education,” Anna explains. “We know that young people are going to change the world. It’s not us.”
Noubar echoes Anna’s point. “Our guiding light in everything we’ve done in Armenia is that we consider our clients to be five-year-olds in Armenia. We do not hold ourselves accountable to any government or any adult.” For Noubar, the adults of Armenia are preoccupied with the present, because they are pressed into managing a very difficult geopolitical situation. “They’re making choices, survival choices today. And yet, you really need kids to be thought of, because that’s the future of the country. So I’d say, we think we’re working on important things, and other people may be working on urgent things.”
The “important things” that Noubar has in mind are those that nurture the inner and outer worlds of Armenian children, including their connection to the Diaspora, and the meaning of that connection to broader Armenian identity. “I’d like it to be that a young Armenian kid identifies with a young Armenian in Canada,” he remarks. Recalling the writing of William Saroyan, Noubar offers a reflection on the puzzle of Armenian consciousness. “On this topic, Saroyan’s view of the world was that it comprised stateless nations. He considered nationhood, not statehood, and that there are people in the world that identify with common values, common history, common traits, and he thought, Armenians just like that could exist anywhere and everywhere.”
Anna, though Swedish through and through, has no small stake in the future of Armenia. “It’s very natural for me to understand the importance of keeping Armenianness. Sweden is there. It’s not going anywhere. It’s 10 million people. It’s fine. It’s safe. There are little things here and there, but nothing like Armenia. Armenia needs to keep its culture, because cultural identity is really important. My kids have one foot in each right? They speak Swedish fluently, but they grew up in the Armenian church with Armenian dance. It’s really important for their identity.”
For Anna, her relationship with the Armenian experience has changed much since those early years when she introduced Noubar and his two brothers to her clan of strong Swedish women. In those days, Armenian music was as foreign to her as Swedish nature walks were to Noubar. Now, it surrounds her and fills her home. “I was just on the Cape, and my third daughter had her friends there, and I’m going to the pool, and it’s all Armenian music–it’s like dance music. It’s just fun to see, you know, and they feel the attachment to the culture, to each other, and to the country. So that’s a great thing. You need to belong. So many people don’t belong.”
The Children of Armenia Fund is proud to work alongside partners like the Afeyans to safeguard the next chapter in the Armenian story.
This article was originally published on coaf.org by the Children of Armenia Fund (COAF). COAF is a nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming the lives of children in rural Armenia through a holistic approach to education, healthcare, child and family care, and economic development. COAF has helped over 100,000 beneficiaries expand their universe so that they can shape a brighter future.