Rachel Emerson is a research scientist for Idaho National Laboratory’s Biofuels and Renewable Energy Technologies Department. Her work supports the Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office by developing physiological and chemical characterization techniques for lignocellulosic biomass feedstocks intended for both thermochemical and biochemical conversion processes. Primarily, her research has included developing rapid characterization models for analyzing the composition of raw and treated biomass feedstocks using a variety of multivariate spectroscopy techniques including near-infrared, mid-infrared, and laser induced breakdown spectroscopy. Emerson is also involved in developing microwave enhanced fast pyrolysis instrumentation for the purpose of rapidly screening and selection of feedstocks for thermochemical conversion industrial scale pyrolysis processes. Her work has also focused on looking at the effects of both environmental stresses and pretreatments on the composition and convertibility of biomass feedstocks. Her master’s degree research, from Idaho State University, involved developing an algorithm termed Local Adaptive Fusion Regression to improve the quality of spectroscopic multivariate predictive models.

She obtained a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Idaho where her research focused on gas chromatography/mass spectrometry drug analysis.

Development of novel chemometric techniques for selecting spectral calibration samples for local modeling