Rachel covers the debates and personalities that shape scientific knowledge, most recently as Digital Science Editor for Smithsonian Magazine. In 2016 she launched a special series at Smithsonian to uncover the stories of women scientists who were written out of history. She now tells these stories as a columnist for the BBC Future series "Missed Genius."

In 2019 she received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship to complete research and reporting for her book. Before that she was a 2018-19 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, where she studied reproductive biology, gender, and history of science. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, WIRED, New Scientist, Slate, Undark, and NPR, among others.