Natasha V. Raikhel[5] (born 1947) is a professor of plant cell biology at University of California, Riverside and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

From a young age, she was cultivated to become a concert pianist, until a teacher dissuaded her during her final year of high school from pursuing music as a career.

[6] The incident, alongside the death of her father and regular anti-Semitic encounters, convinced the couple to take their son abroad rather than to continue to live in the Soviet Union.

[9] She has done research related to SNARE proteins in plants, an understudied area, including Zheng et al 1999 in which she and her team found AtVTI1a to be essential to Golgi⇄vacuole trafficking.

In 2012 Raikhel was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for "pioneering the use of novel genetic and biochemical techniques to elucidate the organization and function of the secretory system in plant cells.