Dr Rachel Clewes graduated from the University of Leeds in 1997 with a BSc (Hons) in Genetics and Microbiology and then completed an MSc in the Biomedical Basis of Disease at Sheffield Hallam University in 1998. She then went on to work as a Scientific Officer in the Colorectal Cancer Unit at St Mark's Hospital, Harrow before moving to Eisai London Research Laboratories as a Research Associate working on occludin phosphorylation in brain cell extracts.
She then moved to the US for a year working on PI3-kinase activity in breast cancer cell lines and PTEN mutations in human brain tumours at the University of California, San Francisco at the Comprehensive Cancer Center. Rachel returned to Warwickshire in 2004 and joined the University of Warwick as a Research Technician first at the Wellesbourne Campus working on host- pathogen interactions in plants, before moving to the School of Life Sciences. In 2014 she started working with Prof. Lorenzo Frigerio on plant aquaporins and their role in germination. This led onto Rachel’s PhD on the trafficking of tonoplast intrinsic proteins to the vacuole membrane.
Rachel joined Micropathology’s virology team in December 2020.