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 public outreach efforts, 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. In addition, she organizes 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 science capacity for the Pacific region.

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 wide array 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, an all-girls private school in Honolulu, before shifting her focus to issues associated with shifting weather patterns. Now, she facilitates the dissemination of important scientific results from researchers to those needing the information (environmental managers, policymakers, and the general public) to make our world a better place.