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Rachel Kurchin is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a computational materials scientist focusing on electronic structure theory, data science, and energy device modeling to address the climate crisis. Kurchin actively contributes to the development of various scientific codes and serves as an editor for the Journal of Open Source Software. She completed her B.S. in Physics from Yale University in 2013, followed by an MPhil in Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge in 2014, funded by the Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Kurchin earned her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019, supported by the Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship. From 2019 to 2022, she conducted postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University, supported by fellowships at the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI). Since joining CMU's faculty in Fall 2022, Kurchin has been engaged with the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and is a member of the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute. 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.
Admission is extremely competitive with no strict GPA cut-offs; holistic review is used.