Dr Rachel Furmidge

BSc (Hons), PhD

School of Clinical Dentistry

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Rachel Furmidge
Profile picture of Rachel Furmidge
rachel.furmidge@sheffield.ac.uk
Room C45, 19 Claremont Crescent

Full contact details

Dr Rachel Furmidge
School of Clinical Dentistry
Room C45
19 Claremont Crescent
Sheffield
S10 2TA
Profile

Dr Rachel Furmidge conducted her PhD at the University of Sheffield. During her PhD, she focused on developing porous materials for the restoration of soft tissue volume which can be lost following major trauma, tumour resections and burns.

Rachel joined the School of Clinical Dentistry in 2024 as a research associate, continuing her research in soft tissue engineering with Professor Helen Colley and Professor Craig Murdoch. The team are working on a multidisciplinary Yorkshire Cancer Research funded project lead by Dr Dawn Walker using tissue engineering of oral tissues and electrical impedance spectroscopy to help improve oral cancer diagnostics.

Alongside her role as a PDRA, Rachel also works part time as an Entrepreneurial Lead, conducting market research to progress through the INSIGNEO commercialisation journey to bring a medical device for soft tissue repair to the market.

Qualifications

BSc Biomedical Science with a Year in Industry

PhD Advanced Biomedical Materials

Research interests

Rachel’s research is focused on soft tissue engineering, to develop solutions to meet urgent clinical needs. 

Currently, Rachel works on creating tissue-engineered models of healthy, pre-cancerous and cancerous oral mucosal epithelium. She uses electrical impedance spectroscopy to measure electrical impedance through these models, which will be later combined with computational modelling and machine learning to train a novel point-of-care diagnostic device to detect the difference between healthy, dysplastic and cancerous oral tissue.

Publications

Journal articles