Rachel Lentz wears several hats in her position at Hawaiʻi Sea Grant. She works with the communications team as a writer, editor, and contributor on Ka Pili Kai and other communications products, and helps with outreach efforts to the community, both physical and digital. Rachel has also become a reporting specialist to help fulfill the important role of sharing updates on all of Hawaiʻi Sea Grants’ projects with NOAA. She also runs the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) for Hawaiʻi Sea Grant and the Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center (PI-CASC), offering undergraduate students valuable research experience with the goal of building future capacity for the Pacific region in climate and marine science.

Rachel earned her PhD at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, as a hard rock planetary geologist, studying lava flow emplacement mechanisms on Earth to learn about the formation of volcanic rocks on the Moon and Mars. She spent several years as a post-doctoral researcher, first at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and later back at UH Mānoa, studying the petrology of new Martian meteorites. In addition, she tackled a diverse set of projects, from helping create a photographic library of microscopic rock textures to brainstorming innovative uses of self-configuring robots (out of USC) for future NASA missions. She subsequently taught math and science to middle and high school students for six years at St. Andrew’s Priory, a Honolulu all-girls private school, before shifting her focus to climate issues. Now, she facilitates the dissemination of important scientific results from climate and marine researchers to those needing the information (resource managers, policymakers, and the general public) to make our world a better place.