Rachel Combs-Giroir is from St. Louis, MO and received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Missouri. She is currently a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University in the Translational Plant Sciences graduate program under the advisement of Dr. Andrea Gschwend.

Her PhD research is focused on the physical and molecular mechanisms underlying flooding tolerance in the biofuel cover crop, pennycress. Pennycress is being optimized for off-season integration into corn and soybean rotations across the Midwest, with the potential to produce up to 1 billion liters of seed oil annually by 2030. Rachel has been part of a highly collaborative effort, spanning multiple universities and institutions, to enhance the environmental resiliency of this new cash crop.

In 2020, Rachel was a recipient of the NSF graduate research fellowship program which has funded her stipend and enrollment. During her time at OSU, she has served on her department’s graduate student association and has mentored several graduate, undergraduate, and high school students in the lab.

Rachel is passionate about employing cutting-edge research for innovative solutions to climate change and current agricultural challenges. She anticipates graduating in Spring 2024 and is pursuing a career in the agricultural industry sector related to genomics, breeding, and computational biology.