Rachelle Hunt, B.S. Biology, Northeastern University

Rachelle grew up in the Boston area. She graduated from Northeastern University with a B.S. in Biology in 2017. Her undergraduate research included generating Drosophila models of neurofibromatosis under Dr. James Walker at Massachusetts General Hospital and characterizing autophagy components in aging in Dr. David Sinclair’s lab at Harvard Medical School. In her later years, she also worked at Pfizer developing small molecule screens for enhancing immune-mediated clearance of amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s disease. Beyond graduation, she embarked on a post-baccalaureate fellowship at the NIH in the lab of Dr. Michael Otto, where she characterized the beneficial relationship between Staphylococcal skin colonization and the host epidermis. As a Gruber Foundation Fellow and now NSF fellow, her doctoral research in the Crawford lab focuses on studying new metabolic pathways at the host-bacteria interface.