Rachel graduated from Syracuse University in 2017 with a B.A. in Sociology, Policy Studies, and Citizenship and Civic Engagement. Her honors thesis used a case study of a high-poverty, post-industrial small town to provide a cultural explanation to the theoretical and empirical puzzle of why community attachments are often resilient to the community social disorganization spurred by deindustrialization. While a senior at Syracuse, she was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in Sociology. Her current research interests include community sociology (with a focus on small towns and rural communities), cultural sociology, and poverty with a particular interest in the role of culture/cognition in (re)producing neighborhood effects and community disadvantage.