Rachel Sholder

About Rachel Sholder

Rachel Sholder is a NASA-affiliated cost analyst at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) in the Space Exploration Sector. She joined APL in 2017 after earning her M.S. in Statistics and B.S. in Mathematics from Lehigh University. Rachel is currently a doctoral candidate in Johns Hopkins University’s Doctor of Engineering program, where she is pioneering the field of space epidemiology—using infectious disease modeling to understand how space debris spreads through Earth’s orbit. At APL, she leads life-cycle cost estimates for NASA missions across all phases of development—from pre-proposal through major milestone reviews—and has served as the cost analyst for missions including EZIE and IMAP. She also worked as a fault management systems engineer on DART, NASA’s first planetary defense mission. A recognized leader in the NASA cost estimating community, Rachel was named NASA’s Cost Rising Star in 2023 and NASA’s Cost Analyst of the Year in 2025.