Rachel Gregor, PhD

I'm a chemist fascinated by the secondary metabolites and natural products that govern microbial interactions. My research focuses on a key open question: what is the ecological role of the elaborate chemical diversity that marine microbes produce? My approach harnesses a chemical biology toolbox coupled with microbial ecology techniques to address this question systematically and map the connections between metabolites, bacteria, and the environment. My current work focuses on the regulation and production of microbial specialized metabolites in the global oceans, and their impact on the microbial processes that govern the marine carbon cycle. 

I am a postdoctoral fellow with Otto X. Cordero in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with postdoctoral fellowships from the Simons Foundation and the Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet (C-CoMP) . I completed my PhD in Chemistry in 2020 at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, under the supervision of Michael M. Meijler.