Dr. Rauch is an Associate Professor at the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Oregon Health and Science University. She received her Doctorate (PhD) from the University of Salzburg in Austria, where she studied antimicrobial neuropeptides in the skin. She worked on interferons in intestinal inflammation and inflammasome mediated gastrointestinal pathogen defense in her postdoctoral research at the University of Vienna and during an Erwin-Schrödinger postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. She received the Austrian scientists and scholars in the northern Americas award and the UC Berkeley outstanding postdoc award for her work showing rapid epithelial cell extrusion upon cytosolic pathogen detection by inflammasomes. 

Dr. Rauch started her own independent lab focusing on epithelial responses to pathogen infection in 2019. Their research uses genetic mouse models of in vivoinfection as well as stem cell derived organoids as primary epithelial cell in vitro models. Current projects are focusing on the inflammasome response in a specific type of epithelial cell, the tuft cell, the mechanics of inflammasome induced cell extrusion, and whether pathogens can inhibit this process with their effector arsenal.