Rachel E. Monyak

Biography

Assistant Professor of Biology Rachel Monyak joined the Stonehill College community in 2023. She previously taught introductory biology and chemistry courses as an adjunct faculty member at Emmanuel College.

Monyak began her career in biology at a research lab at Mount Holyoke College. This experience led her to attend graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied the ways in which loss of the FMR1 gene causes altered memory and circadian behavior in fruit flies. She later completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School under the mentorship of Dr. Edward Kravitz. While there, she used a fly model to study aggression, focusing specifically on how male and female aggressive behaviors are encoded in the brain. She continues this research at Stonehill by identifying genes that control female and/or male aggression in flies. 

Education

• Ph.D., Cell and Molecular Biology, University of Pennsylvania
• B.A., Biology, Mount Holyoke College

Courses Taught

• Introduction to Neuroscience
• Research Methods in Neuroscience
• BIO 101 and 102 Lab