Study Pharmacology at Otago

Nahid Khalas:

Hi, I’m Nahid. I’m a third-year Pharmacology student. I really started loving this course in second year when I did my first Pharmacology paper. It’s so interesting how broad Pharmacology is — how different drugs act differently in the body, in different people, in different parts of the body. So that was super interesting.

And it’s super special to be in Dunedin because it’s such a student-friendly place. You’re always with your friends, you can walk everywhere, it’s always a good time in Dunedin.

Associate Professor John Ashton:

Hello, I’m John Ashton. I’m an Associate Professor in Pharmacology and Toxicology here in the University of Otago.

What is Pharmacology and Toxicology? Well, I can tell you my particular field of study is Pharmacology. And Pharmacology is the study of drugs — how do drugs work, how do they cure diseases, what bad effects can they have, and how are they processed as they go through our body, as they enter our body and leave our body.

So that type of study goes into medicine, it goes into pharmaceutical sciences, and it goes into a wide range of other social concerns like drugs of abuse, controlled drugs, new medicines and how people access them.

So people might ask: how are we different than Pharmaceutical Sciences? Well, we really study how drugs work in the body and at the molecular level, rather than how they’re put together as a medicine.

One of the things that’s really distinctive about Pharmacology and Toxicology is the flip side of it. So at a particular dose, something might be a medicine, might be beneficial, and at a higher dose it might be a toxin. So we’re always balancing those two things.

But what is different about Pharmacology — and you can see this — is that we don’t start until Year Two. We don’t have a Year One Pharmacology paper. And the reason for this is Pharmacology is innately an integrated, interdisciplinary discipline. That is to say, you’ve got to know biochemistry, chemistry, physiology, anatomy and so forth. So you’ve got to have that background before you can put it together and understand how a drug works. How does a molecule work on a protein to cause an effect in the entire body and so forth?

So you’ve got to be able to think about these different fields. We start in Year Two and therefore it rewards and encourages those students — or people — who like to think integratively rather than reductively. And not just across the disciplines in academia, but across levels of social concern.

So you’ve got pure research, the curiosity-driven stuff. You’ve got: how does this help people in society? There is the public policy: how do we regulate this drug — is it going to be a problem, is it causing people to die or become addicted? And then there is the development, of course — new drugs, drug discovery.

So we find that our graduates go into a lot of different related areas. You might think that, well, apart from research, what is there? Well, internationally, pharmaceutical companies are huge employers of Pharmacology graduates — or postgraduates, at least.

But beyond that, we have found our graduates going into a lot of different areas — in policymaking, in different government departments. We have someone in Dunedin who set up a science writing company. We have graduates working for tech companies. We have graduates in startups. We have graduates working as sales and technical representatives for pharmaceutical companies, right here in New Zealand.

So there’s a wide range of positions that expertise in Pharmacology can give you.