Senior Scientist, IPAC, Caltech
Rachel Akeson is a senior scientist at IPAC at Caltech. She has supported a wide range of NASA Astrophysics missions and community-facing projects, both ground and space-based.
Her science management experience includes roles as the Keck Interferometer Project Scientist and leading the IPAC teams supporting Kepler, the NASA Exoplanet Archive, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and SPHEREx.
She is an expert in interferometric observations, concentrating on understanding the formation of stellar and planetary systems and has used many facilities, including the VLA and ALMA. She received her Ph.D. from Caltech and was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the staff at IPAC.