Rachel Slaybaugh

Rachel Slaybaugh is a General Partner at DCVC, the deep tech venture firm, where she leads climate, sustainability, and energy investments. A nuclear engineer by training - she once operated a reactor as an undergrad at Penn State - she spent eight years as a tenured Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, ran the Cyclotron Road accelerator division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and served as a Program Director at the U.S. Department of Energy's ARPA-E, where she created the nuclear fission program and helped fund over 30 companies. She co-founded the Good Energy Collective and the Nuclear Innovation Bootcamp, and now backs companies like Fervo Energy, Brimstone, Radiant Industries, Zap Energy, Fourth Power, and Equilibrium Energy at DCVC.