Rachel Calaz

Rachel Calaz has an Honours degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Cape Town and plans to pursue a Master’s in Data Science in 2025. Her interests include numerical simulation and optimisation, especially with regards to renewable energy and power systems modelling. She worked extensively in this field during her undergraduate studies as well as at her time at Meridian Economics.

Rachel has a great interest in data science and utilising advanced computing and machine learning methods to analyse large data sets. She has experience with supervised and unsupervised methods through her Honour’s thesis titled “CO2 Hydrogenation: Conversion and Selectivity Trends on Iron Catalysts”. Here she mined large data sets using regular expressions and various additional tools as well as utilised methods such as random forest, extreme gradient boost and principal component analysis to analyse the data.