Raquel was born in Lisbon Portugal, where she graduated from Instituto Superior Tecnico in 2009. After that she went to do a Masters in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, and completed her PhD in 2015 at Max Planck Institute of Solid State Physics in Stuttgart. Raquel did a postdoc in Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and is since 2022 an Assistant Professor of Physics at Columbia University