Rachel is a microbiologist and leader in the study of fermented food microbiomes. Originally trained as a bacterial geneticist with Jonathan Beckwith at Harvard Medical School, she pioneered the use of fermented foods like cheese as simplified microbial ecosystems to help reveal how more complex microbiomes work. As a Bauer Fellow at Harvard University and then a Professor of Biological Sciences at UC San Diego, she led research to grow microbiomes in the lab and probe how microbes interact and evolve within communities. Rachel moved to Arcadia Science in 2022 to build new models for doing science, and continues to build towards expanding our understanding of fermented foods at Astera.