Dr Rachel Williamson is a Principal Scientist on the MX Beamlines at the Australian Synchrotron. Together with Dr Alan Riboldi-Tunnicliffe, she is jointly responsible for the operation, maintenance, development and management of the Macromolecular Crystallography (MX1) and Microfocus Crystallography (MX2) beamlines.
After completing her PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from Massey University (NZ) in 1999, Rachel worked as a Science Advisor at Medsafe (Ministry of Health, NZ) evaluating both generic and new medicines for safety and efficacy. She then returned to research and development as an NIH funded Postdoctoral Fellow in the Bioscience Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) from 2002 to 2006. Using core skills developed during her PhD, she undertook research for the Centre for Disease Control, synthesizing targeted stable isotope labelled bioactive molecules. She returned to the southern hemisphere to take up an appointment at Melbourne University as an Editorial Assistant for Organic Letters. Rachel has been a Beamline Scientist at the Australian Synchrotron since 2007, specialising in chemical crystallography, with research interests in organic electronics and biosensors.