Rachel Meyer

Dr Rachel Meyer is an associate adjunct professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, and the Chief Scientific Officer of eDNA Explorer. She helped start and currently directs the CALeDNA program at the University of California that runs citizen and community science grassroots eDNA research projects and an eDNA service lab for the National Park Service and other practitioners. The eDNA Explorer is a company she spun out of a CALeDNA grant to make eDNA informatics accessible for everybody. She also runs workshops on science policy such as on bioethics and the Nagoya Protocol. Her interest in molecular ecology and biodiversity science stemmed from studying plant evolution and ethnoecology. She obtained her PhD from the City University of New York and New York Botanical Garden in 2012, did an NSF Plant Genome Postdoctoral Fellowship at the NYU Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, and then a AAAS Science and Technology based at NSF working on the Dimensions of Biodiversity program. She joined the UC Conservation Genomics Consortium as the Executive Director in 2016, which launched CALeDNA. Now at UCSC as a PI in the Paleogenomics Laboratory, she expanded CALeDNA to have international reach, with applications-focused projects in Rwanda and South Africa, focusing on using ancient DNA to guide rewilding and on integrating eDNA with remote sensing data to improve NASA biomonitoring from space.

December 2019