Dr Rachel Thorley 

Dr Rachel Thorley is Churchill’s CORE fellow, responsible for community, outreach and recruitment activities in engineering, and developing the engineering community within and beyond college.

Rachel is an alumna of Newnham college (2008), and has always had a love of learning and education. She has worked as both a secondary school physics teacher, and, more recently, as a University Teacher at the University of Sheffield. There, her main interests lay in helping engineering students develop awareness of sustainability, cultural agility, and professional skills, working as academic lead on Global Engineering Challenge, an interdisciplinary project-based module delivered to 1200 undergraduates each year.

Rachel has established several STEM outreach programmes at Churchill College, including:

Living Lab: Climate Action, in association with the Royal Academy of Engineering

and

Sustainable Urban Futures, in association with the Isaac Newton Trust

Rachel has a passion for design and creativity, volunteering at a local makerspace and spending time off in her miniature ceramics studio, a.k.a. the potting shed!