• Royce Fellowship
Rachel
Pepper

Concentration 

Biophysics

Award Year 

2001

Rachel worked on the creation of an experimental model system to explore macromolecular crowding-driven polymerization at a basic level. Her study of this phenomenon led to a deeper understanding of cellular processes, particularly in the polymerization and building of actin, a filament responsible for many aspects of cell shape and movement.

Rachel is currently a Miller Institute postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley working with the Koehl lab and the Environmental Fluid Mechanics group. She received her Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University working in Howard Stone's group in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Colorado at Boulder Department of Physics working in the Physics Education Research Group. While at UC Rachel studied student learning difficulties and helped transform upper-division physics courses. In 2002 Rachel Pepper, a biophysics concentrator, received a Marshall Scholarship. She pursued a second bachelor’s degree – in mathematics – at the University of Cambridge. Rachel chose the Cambridge math program because it places a heavy emphasis on theoretical physics. In 2001 Rachel was the recipient of a Goldwater Scholarship, a national scholarship awarded to promising young scientists.