Dr. Fiona Freeman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at University College Dublin (UCD). She graduated with a degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2011 and earned her PhD from the University of Galway in 2016, focusing on developing new strategies for bone tissue regeneration. Afterward, Dr. Freeman was awarded two prestigious postdoctoral fellowships: the Government of Ireland IRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship. These fellowships provided her with opportunities to work as a postdoctoral researcher in renowned labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Johns Hopkins University, and Trinity College Dublin. She is the recipient of the prestigious New Investigator Recognition Award (NIRA) from the Orthopaedic Research Society (ORS) (2020) and was named a Top Innovator under 35 by MIT Technology Review in 2023.

Dr. Freeman leads a multidisciplinary research group investigating the use of innovative biomedical engineering techniques to better understand and develop novel therapeutics to treat paediatric bone cancer, particularly osteosarcoma. Her group is pursuing two different approaches to osteosarcoma. The first involves developing patient-specific models of osteosarcoma for drug development. Accelerating cures for patients with poor outcomes remains a challenge, partly because osteosarcoma is a relatively rare disease. Therefore, recruiting enough eligible participants to conduct clinical trials is a difficult endeavor. These patient-specific models can act as a potential screening method for new cancer treatments, as they provide the flexibility to understand how organs might respond to potential new treatments before conducting full clinical trials.

The second avenue Dr. Freeman’s lab is exploring is the development of novel therapeutics that can be used as an add-on to traditional chemotherapy to enhance the therapeutic potential of the treatment. Dr. Freeman’s research has identified a novel microRNA, miR-29b, as a potential therapeutic target for osteosarcoma. In particular, she is focused on designing smart delivery vehicles that can transport the treatment directly to cancer cells or the patient’s own immune cells to enhance the patient’s ability to attack the tumor itself.

Dr. Freeman is currently a Conway Fellow, a European Research Council Starter Grant awardee, a funded investigator in the SFI Research Centres for Advanced Materials and Bioengineering Research and I-Form, and a Principal Investigator within the UCD Centre for Biomedical Engineering and the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering.

Publications