Rate My Professor Stephen Swindells

Stephen Swindells serves as the Technical Services Manager at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Otago, in Dunedin, New Zealand. In this capacity, he oversees the Technical Services Laboratory within the Dental Laboratories, located in the Walsh Building at 310 Great King Street, Dunedin 9016. His responsibilities involve managing technical support for the dental school's educational and research activities, including laboratory operations for teaching and student projects. Swindells engages with students during accreditation visits by the Dental Council of New Zealand, discussing aspects such as technical experiences, supervision, and laboratory facilities for BDentTech programmes. He has also hosted demonstrations of the facilities for visiting academics, dignitaries including education ministers, and international collaborators.

Swindells holds a BAppMan (Strategic Planning). He has contributed to peer-reviewed literature through two publications in 2012. The first, co-authored with Sara Hanning, Lidia Motoi, and Natalie Medlicott from the School of Pharmacy, University of Otago, is titled 'A device for the collection of submandibular saliva' and appeared in the Journal of Dentistry (March 2012). It describes the construction of a non-invasive device for collecting submandibular saliva and presents preliminary tests on saliva from a single donor to compare rheological properties with whole saliva. The second publication, 'A novel prosthodontic alternative for patients who are edentulous and have microstomia: A case report', was published in the New Zealand Dental Journal (July 2012). This work addresses prosthetic challenges for edentulous patients with microstomia due to lower lip squamous cell carcinoma excision, where traditional denture methods fail owing to limited mouth opening. His work on ResearchGate has received 20 citations and 197 reads. Swindells is acknowledged for laboratory support in various dental research, including studies on clear aligners, biofilm management, dental arch morphology, and anatomy museum resources.