Dr. Rachel Kurchin

Biography

Rachel Kurchin is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads the Accelerated Computation Materials Energy (ACME) group. She is a computational materials scientist whose research focuses on utilizing electronic structure theory, data science, and energy device modeling to address the climate crisis. She has contributed actively as a developer of various scientific codes and serves as an editor for the Journal of Open Source Software. Kurchin earned her Bachelor of Science in Physics from Yale University in 2013, followed by an M.Phil. in Materials Science and Metallurgy from the University of Cambridge in 2014, supported by the Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She completed her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019 with support from the Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship. From 2019 to 2022, she conducted postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon, supported by fellowships from the university's Manufacturing Futures Initiative and the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI). In 2024, she was selected to participate in the inaugural class of MolSSI Faculty Fellows and received the Scientific Software Research Faculty Award from the Simons Foundation. Kurchin also holds a faculty affiliate position at the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and is a member of the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute.

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Experience

Awards