Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Rachel E. Baker is the John and Elizabeth Irving Family Assistant Professor of Climate & Health at Brown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. As an environmental scientist and infectious disease modeler, her work focuses on understanding the environmental and behavioral drivers of spatial heterogeneity in disease outbreaks, with particular emphasis on how climate change is reshaping infectious disease dynamics. She integrates statistical inference, mechanistic disease modeling, and emerging machine-learning approaches to advance both prediction and fundamental understanding of disease transmission.

Baker received her Ph.D. from Princeton University through the Cooperative Program in Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences (CPREE). She also holds a master’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge and a bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of Bristol. Prior to joining Brown, she was a postdoctoral researcher and associate research scholar at Princeton University in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute.

Her research has been published in leading journals, including Science, PNAS, Nature Communications, and Climatic Change, and has been featured in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, WIRED, and Scientific American. Her work aims to illuminate the intersecting risks posed by climate change and infectious disease, providing insights relevant to public health preparedness and policy.