Rachel defended her dissertation, Exoplanet Demographics Beyond Kepler: Giant Planets with Radial Velocity & Young Planets with TESS, on April 20. The thesis focuses on understanding how planets form and evolve by connecting the properties of their natal environment to the exoplanets discovered around mature stars. Rachel's dissertation work has so far resulted in two first-author papers, with another close to submission.

Rachel has been awarded the Penn State President's Postdoctoral Fellowship and was also named as a Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds Fellow at Penn State.