Rachel Johnston

Rachel Johnston is a Conservation Genomics Scientist at Zoo New England since October 2021. Previously, Rachel served as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University from 2017 to October 2021, focusing on the epigenetic and gene regulatory effects of social environments in highly social mammals. Rachel's academic background includes a Foerster-Bernstein Fellowship and teaching assistant role at the University of California, Los Angeles, along with an HHMI Gilliam Fellowship that involved genomic data analysis and CRISPR-Cas9 research. An undergraduate researcher at New Mexico State University from 2007 to 2010, Rachel conducted independent research on gene identification in Drosophila melanogaster. Rachel holds a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from UCLA and a BS in Biology from New Mexico State University.