Rachel completed her PhD with Professor Greg Cook at the University of Otago (New Zealand) in 2017. She continued working in Professor Cook’s group as a postdoctoral researcher and co-investigator on project targeted at understanding antimicrobial tolerance in the bacterial pathogen Enterococcus faecalis. In 2024, Rachel joined Professor Henrik Strahl’s laboratory at Newcastle University to work on the AVERT sLoLa project investigating how the universal IM30 stress proteins protect the cell from membrane stress. She is particularly interested in enterococci and how their unique physiology may hold the key to understanding the interesting dynamic between cell stress responses and antimicrobial susceptibility.