Laura Rachal, MD, MS

Dr. Laura Rachal is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and joined the Section of General Internal Medicine in 2023 as an Academic Hospitalist and Infectious Diseases specialist at University Medical Center and Tulane Medical Center. She is board certified in Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and Infectious Diseases.  

A native of Louisiana, Dr. Rachal completed a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences and a Bachelor of Arts in French Studies at Louisiana State University before completing a Masters in Biosciences at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in France. She received her medical degree at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. During medical training, she spent three months in Lambarene, Gabon, as an Albert Schweitzer Fellow working as the Internal Medicine Fellow, which inspired her love of transitions of care, tropical medicine, HIV care, and infectious diseases.

She completed residency training in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics here at Tulane School of Medicine, where she was a RIGHT Global Health Scholar spending time on sepsis research in Sierra Leone. She has since gone on to complete both Adult and Pediatric Infectious Diseases Fellowships at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she focused on adolescent and young adult HIV care and patient communications as well as worked on several medical education and quality improvement projects.

Interests:

Dr. Rachal is passionate about patient-centered communication, LBGTQ+ healthcare, medical education, transitions of care between pediatrics and internal medicine, and wellness in healthcare.