FREEDIVING PHARMACIST
Hometown: Klamath Falls, Oregon
Age:36
Years Diving:11
Why I’m A DAN Member: I’m grateful for the health resources and medical research that DAN provides to support both scuba divers and freedivers. As a frequent traveler for both scuba diving and freediving, I also value DAN’s support for recreational dives, travel overseas, and coverage for my students as they learn how to explore the underwater world on one breath.
A shift in trajectory moved Rachel Novak, PharmD, from being a nerdy but athletic wallflower (her words) to being an adventurous and glamorous (my words) fire dancer, freediver, rock climber, scuba diver, stunt performer, and mermaid celebrity. That shift came from the world of pageants.
An academic high achiever, Novak was a college student at Oregon Tech by the time she was 16. On the way to class one day she saw a flier for free scholarships. Thinking that she was a contender for the athletic and academic scholarships, she entered the Miss Klamath County scholarship pageant in 2007. To her surprise she won and went on to place in the top 10 at the Miss Oregon competition for three years, earning more than $17,000 in scholarship money to help pay for her college education. She later earned her doctorate in pharmacy from Oregon State.
Pageants also gave her opportunities to confront her fear of being on stage and helped challenge her perceptions of what it meant to be in pageants. She poured her newfound confidence and creative energy from competing in pageants into performing as a fire dancer. Her goal was to be a pharmacist by day and circus performer by night.
Novak was working for a biotech company, and her plan was trending in the right direction until she suffered a traumatic brain injury at age 25, when a pull-up bar she was using in a workout slipped out of the door jamb, leaving her with a fractured skull. Her parallel life depended on her athleticism, so it had to go on hold as she healed. That time off led to a philosophic evolution: There are no guarantees of tomorrow, so the things she planned to do in her life took on fresh urgency.
To have the time to turn her passions into professions, Novak structured her career as a contract on-call pharmacist specializing in rural and travel medicine, giving her the latitude to pursue interesting career opportunities if they arose. A few years later she moved to Thailand for a divemaster internship, receiving training that helped prepare her for the in-water skills she would need later in life.
Novak carved out aspirational bucket-list items of achievement rooted in stunt performing, scuba diving, skydiving, and freediving. She had spent plenty of time on sailboats, but her freediving was mostly to check anchor placement or perform as a professional mermaid.
When she was a divemaster on Koh Phi Phi, Thailand, she loved leading snorkel tours and bombing down to scuba depths on breath-hold to surprise her instructor buddies leading their groups. When she enrolled in a freediving course in 2019, however, she discovered how unsafe she had been the previous four years, thus forging her strong advocacy for freediving safety.
Novak became a freediving instructor and trained relentlessly. In 2023 she competed with the U.S. freediving team in Roatán, Honduras, and she set the U.S. record for the 4×50-meter pool swim with a monofin at 3 minutes 36.102 seconds. She was a commentator for the Vertical Blue 2021 Freediving Competition in the Bahamas and the 2024 CMAS (Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques) Freediving World Championships.
Mermaiding became a significant part of her repertoire, and she became Miss Mermaid Nevada 2021-2023. Freediving fit beautifully into her stunt career as well, working as an in-water stunt performer on Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever and a cast member on Netflix’s MerPeople documentary.
When Novak moved to Las Vegas to perform as a fire dancer on Celestia, she developed a passion for rock climbing, which she sees as a fitness challenge that also requires considerable mental fortitude. She has also worked as a safety diver for O by Cirque du Soleil. She now spends winters in Las Vegas and summers in the Pacific Northwest, finding contract work as a pharmacist in both locations.
With her background in pageants and a passion for scuba and freediving, it is not surprising she found her way to the Scuba Queen USA Organization, a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower ocean ambassadors, with an emphasis on conservation. Their first pageant for women divers was in 2011. In 2024 Novak became the reigning Scuba Queen USA and was selected as the first runner-up at Miss Scuba International in Sabah, Malaysia, where she won the “Top Talent” award with her fire-dancing skills.
Novak now plans to turn her energy to exploring inland freediving destinations in the U.S. while continuing to perform, offer freediving safety education, and use her background in freediving and medicine to support the competitive freediving community.
She playfully jests that she’s only 36 years old and has time for at least three more careers, including the creation of continuing education for health care providers to help support divers and freedivers.
Keep up with her on Instagram, @thesailingsiren.
Explore More
See more of Rachel Novak’s talents in this video.
© Alert Diver – Q1 2026