Faculty Spotlight: Rachel Snider

Rachel Snider, Ph.D., joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette as an instructor in August of 2025. She teaches general chemistry lecture and laboratory courses as well as inorganic laboratory. Dr. Snider grew up in Montgomery, Alabama as one of four girls and is the daughter of two Air Force veterans. Dr. Snider attended Sweet Briar College along the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she discovered her love of scientific instruments and became drawn to analytical chemistry. After a summer undergraduate research opportunity at Vanderbilt University between junior and senior years of college, Dr. Snider moved to Nashville to study electrochemistry in the laboratory of Dr. David Cliffel. Her doctoral thesis focused on the development of electrochemical sensors to monitor cellular respiration in response to toxins and to determine the ability of isolated islet cells to produce insulin.

Dr. Snider’s postdoctoral work as a National Research Council fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. and at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul was focused on microbial fuel cells and developing techniques to determine the method of extracellular electron transport in the anode biofilms of the obligate anaerobe Geobacter sulfurreducens. Dr. Snider worked as a high school teacher for four years teaching at a girls’ school in Memphis, Tennessee before moving to Lafayette Louisiana where she has lived since 2018.

In graduate school, Dr. Snider adopted a stray cat found behind the chemistry building who was named Einstein. This theme has continued since with rescue cats named Alessandro Volta, Marie Curie, and Michael Faraday. A passionate fan of the Nashville Predators hockey team, Dr. Snider is sad to have moved to Lafayette after the era of the Ice Gators.

Contact Dr. Snider at this link:
rachel.snider1@louisiana.edu