Rachel S. Somerville is an American astrophysicist and astronomer and holds the George A. and Margaret M. Downsbrough Chair in Astrophysics at Rutgers University.
[4] She holds an undergraduate degree in physics from Reed College, awarded in 1989, and a Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she worked with Joel Primack.
She held the position of Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan and was a staff astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg.
In July 2011 she joined the faculty of Rutgers University as a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, where she was appointed the inaugural holder of the George A and Margaret M. Downsbrough Chair in Astrophysics.
She leads the theoretical group of the CANDELS survey, the largest project yet undertaken with the Hubble Space Telescope.