Rachel E. Gross

Rachel covers the debates and personalities that shape scientific knowledge, most recently as Digital Science Editor for Smithsonian Magazine. In 2016 she launched a special series at Smithsonian to uncover the stories of women scientists who were written out of history. She now tells these stories as a columnist for the BBC Future series "Missed Genius."

In 2019 she received a MacDowell Fellowship to complete research and reporting for her book. Before that she was a 2018-19 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, where she studied reproductive biology, gender, and history of science. In 2016 she traveled to Germany and Poland as a Journalism Fellow at the FASPE program for the study of professional ethics at Auschwitz.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, WIRED, New Scientist, Slate, Undark, and NPR, among others.

Rachel is an experienced public speaker and panelist. She has moderated Congressional Briefings on basic science, performed for the national storytelling show Story Collider, and hosted educational videos for Scientific American. She’s been a speaker at the Smithsonian Institution, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, MIT’s Women and Gender Studies Department, the Medill School of Journalism, and Harvard.

Her work was recognized in 2019 by an Award for Excellence in Religion Reporting from the Religion News Association (“How To Talk With Evangelicals About Evolution”), and in 2016 by a Wilbur Award for Best Online Story (“How an Evangelical Creationist Accepted Evolution”). In 2020, her video “The Clitoris, Uncovered” was a finalist for an Online Journalism Award in digital storytelling.

Rachel studied English Literature at UC Berkeley and received a master's in Science Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism. Outside of all that, she performs pun monologues onstage and fosters tiny felines.