Rachel Green received her BS in chemistry from the University of Michigan. She then moved to Harvard to pursue her PhD in the lab of Jack Szostak where she worked on designing catalytic RNA molecules and investigating their implications for the evolution of life. As a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Green began to study how the ribosome translates mRNA to protein with such accuracy.
Currently, Green is a Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Research in her lab continues to focus on the ribosome and factors involved in the fidelity of eukaryotic and prokaryotic translation.
Green is the recipient of a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Graduate Teaching Award as well as the recipient for numerous awards for her research. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.