Rachel Pell

Vice President, Strategic Communications

Vice President for Strategic Communications Rachel Pell—a senior-level public relations professional with more than sixteen years of experience in healthcare marketing prior to her transition to higher education—leads the division’s public relations and marketing units, providing strategy and direction for internal and external communications that amplify and support presidential priorities and key University and Penn State Board of Trustees initiatives.

Rachel focuses significantly on creative storytelling and partnerships across paid, owned, shared, and earned media to help drive awareness and audience engagement among Penn Staters.

Since joining Penn State in 2016, she has launched a holistic media strategy and program focused on driving reputation and increasing visibility for the impactful, global-reaching research happening across the University’s twenty-four campus locations. She established Strategic Communications’ first proactive media team and expert database and combined media and science-writing expertise within the unit to increase engagement with top-tier local, regional, national, and international news outlets.

In 2021, Rachel’s team launched a new, best-in-class Penn State News website—which serves as the premier storytelling platform and official source of information about the University for students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members—and accompanying analytics toolkit to drive long-term content strategy.

Under Rachel’s management, the University has codified a top-notch issues and crisis communications program that is agile and responsive to the ever-changing higher education landscape and range of potential issues facing an institution of Penn State’s scale and scope.

As a vital member of the University’s COVID-19 management team throughout the pandemic, Rachel and the team developed and implemented many critical initiatives. One proactive step was the development of the “Mask Up or Pack Up” campaign that united University and local community members in a singular call to action. The research-based community health campaign received top national and global PR awards, as well as recognition from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a national model.

Before joining the Office of Strategic Communications, Rachel was a senior vice president and group manager at Ketchum, a leading PR agency in New York City, and she previously worked at Weber Shandwick, also in New York City. She led the development of strategic professional and consumer-focused programs for leading global pharmaceutical corporations and advocacy organizations, such as Pfizer, Takeda, Boehringer Ingelheim, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and Parkinson’s Unity Walk.

Rachel’s honors include being named a recipient of Ketchum’s David Drobis Client Excellence Award, one of Ketchum’s highest honors that recognizes individuals globally for superior client service. She holds a bachelor of science degree in marketing from Penn State and attended the Center for European Studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.