Rachel Penczykowski

Assistant Professor of Biology

What brought you to disease ecology?

“A pivotal moment as a senior undergraduate. I had decided to take a parasitology class. I knew I loved science. I knew I loved biology. But there was a really critical moment in that class when a guest faculty named Jonathan Patz gave a lecture about environmental change and disease ecology and he talked about a lot of the human-caused changes to the environment. It was one of those light bulb moments where I realized that my interests broadly in ecology and ecosystem processes and some of the physiological and genetic mechanisms within biology could kind of all come together in the study of disease ecology.”

“I remember sitting in class during that lecture and just taking a ton of notes. I'm like circling and underlining and starring things. I realized at that moment that that was something that I was passionate about that I really wanted to pursue further.”

“I went home and started googling some of the names that were name-dropped in that lecture and reading various articles and looking up the author names to see where they were, what universities they worked at, if they had labs. And then I just started asking around about who are the people that study this, how can I find them and do they need graduate students?”

Rachel leads the Plant Disease team. Learn more about their host-pathogen coevolution research here.