Pharmacology

Subjects in a pharmacology major introduce students to the unified study of the interaction between chemical agents and living matter. A pharmacology major will teach you how drugs work, and how drugs are used as therapies and as experimental tools for investigation of important problems in biology. Pharmacology extends and complements a range of other biomedical disciplines as well as chemistry. Graduates will gain an in depth understanding of drug actions and a broad appreciation of the scientific process of knowledge acquisition and problem solving. Thus, a pharmacology major will provide the springboard for students entering careers in many areas of biomedical research and associated industries and regulatory authorities.

By the end of this major a student should have:

• knowledge of the actions of important drugs used clinically and in research;
• an understanding of how the actions of new drugs are characterised and how drugs can be used to investigate questions of biological processes and signaling;
• an understanding of the process of drug discovery and development;
• used modern molecular approaches to solving pharmacological problems, and obtained an appreciation of their application to specific biological problems;
• applied laboratory techniques and analytical approaches in different areas of pharmacology including the analysis and interpretation of data derived from experiments;
• gained experience in the written and oral presentation of scientific data and developed an appreciation of the scientific literature.

Plus (if required to make up 50 points) electives selected from the following areas of study: Anatomy and Cell Biology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Chemistry, Microbiology and Immunology, Neuroscience, Pathology, Physiology, Zoology