Rachel Torres

Rachel Torres holds a PhD in Nanophotonics from MIT, where her thesis on tunable metamaterial absorbers won the departmental award for Outstanding Doctoral Research. She spent two years at Lincoln Laboratory working on advanced optical sensing for defense applications before joining JPL.

Born and raised in Austin, Texas, Rachel developed her love for optics building homemade telescopes with her father. At JPL, she leads the photonics research effort, designing the metamaterial unit cells for the PRISM project and developing custom spectral filters for the NOVA sensor suite. Her ability to bridge theoretical electromagnetic modeling with hands-on fabrication makes her uniquely effective at turning math into devices that bend light.

"I left a comfortable lab at MIT for a startup in Semarang. People thought I was crazy. But the best photonics breakthroughs don't come from comfort — they come from constraints that force you to think differently."