Rate My Professor Rachel Mandelbaum

Rachel Mandelbaum is the Head of the Department of Physics and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her A.B. in Physics with highest honors from Princeton University in 2000 and her Ph.D. in Physics from the same institution in 2006, with a thesis titled “Weak gravitational lensing analysis of Sloan Digital Sky Survey data” advised by Uroš Seljak. Following her doctorate, she was a Hubble Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2006 to 2009, Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University from 2009 to 2011, and Visiting Associate Research Scholar there from 2011 to 2012. Mandelbaum joined Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014 with indefinite tenure granted in 2016, and became full Professor in 2019. She held the Falco-DeBenedetti Career Development Professorship from 2013 to 2016, served as Interim Department Head from 2024 to 2025, and was appointed permanent Head in 2025.

Mandelbaum's research specializes in observational cosmology and galaxy studies, employing weak gravitational lensing and other data analysis techniques on datasets from surveys such as Hyper Suprime-Cam, Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, Euclid, and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. She served as Spokesperson for the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration from 2019 to 2021 and is Principal Investigator at Carnegie Mellon for the LINCC Frameworks Initiative, which develops open-source software for scalable astronomical data analysis. A lead developer of the GalSim image simulation package since 2012, her work has profoundly influenced the field. She was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2024 for developing techniques impacting weak gravitational lensing, cosmological and galaxy formation discoveries via lensing, leadership in cosmic surveys, and mentorship. Other honors include Simons Investigator in Astrophysics (2019), Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2013), Department of Energy Early Career Award (2012), American Astronomical Society Annie Jump Cannon Prize (2011), and Hubble Fellowship (2006). With an h-index of 85 and over 42,000 citations per NASA ADS as of August 2025, Mandelbaum has shaped international collaborations through roles on the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (2023), High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, LSST committees, and decadal surveys. She delivers frequent invited talks, including plenaries at major conferences.