Rauch

Rauch may refer to:

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Melissa Rauch

Melissa Ivy Rauch (/ˈraʊʃ/; born June 23, 1980) is an American actress and comedian. She is best known for her role as Dr. Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

Early life

Rauch was born in Marlboro Township, New Jersey, to Susan and David Rauch. She and her brother, Ben, were raised in a Jewish household.

She attended Frank Defino Central Elementary School in Marlboro. She developed an interest in acting while attending Marlboro High School.

Rauch attended Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, where she received a BFA degree. While going to school, Melissa performed stand-up comedy around Manhattan, and soon made a name for herself on the NYC comedy scene. Her one-woman show, "The Miss Education of Jenna Bush", in which she portrayed Jenna Bush, the former President's daughter, garnered critical acclaim and played to sold-out audiences (Outstanding Solo Show and TheaterMania's Audience Favorite Award—New York International Fringe Festival/HBO's US Comedy Arts Festival).

The Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory (also abbreviated as TBBT) is an American sitcom created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, both of whom serve as executive producers on the show along with Steven Molaro. All three also serve as head writers. The show premiered on CBS on September 24, 2007. The ninth season premiered on September 21, 2015.

The show is primarily centered on five characters living in Pasadena, California: Leonard Hofstadter and Sheldon Cooper, both physicists at Caltech, who share an apartment; Penny, a waitress and aspiring actress who later becomes a pharmaceutical representative, and who lives across the hall; and Leonard and Sheldon's similarly geeky and socially awkward friends and co-workers, aerospace engineer Howard Wolowitz and astrophysicist Raj Koothrappali. The geekiness and intellect of the four guys is contrasted for comic effect with Penny's social skills and common sense.

Over time, supporting characters have been promoted to starring roles: Bernadette Rostenkowski, Howard's girlfriend (later his wife), a microbiologist and former part-time waitress alongside Penny; neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler, who joins the group after being matched to Sheldon on a dating website (and later becomes Sheldon's girlfriend); Stuart Bloom, the cash-strapped owner of the comic book store the characters often visit, who, in season 8, moves in with Howard's mother; and Emily Sweeney, a dermatologist who dates Raj and has a fascination with the macabre.

Big Bang

The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution. The model accounts for the fact that the universe expanded from a very high density and high temperature state, and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background, large scale structure and Hubble's Law. If the known laws of physics are extrapolated beyond where they are valid, there is a singularity. Modern measurements place this moment at approximately 13.8 billion years ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe. After the initial expansion, the universe cooled sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles, and later simple atoms. Giant clouds of these primordial elements later coalesced through gravity to form stars and galaxies.