Professor Bruce R Russell is the new Dean of the School of Pharmacy, having been the Acting Dean of the School since earlier this year.
Professor Bruce R Russell has been appointed the new Dean of the School of Pharmacy.
Having formally started in the role on Monday, 21 October, he has been the Acting Dean of the School since Professor Carlo Marra left earlier this year.
Bruce says he is excited about the future of the School and would like to serve as an advocate for the profession of pharmacy.
“The profession is more varied, rewarding, and exciting than much of the public might realise,” Bruce says.
“I suspect a lot of people are still unaware of what the profession does and can do on a daily basis. The Covid-19 pandemic helped raise public awareness of the profession's role but there is still quite a lot to do to encourage more students to view this as a valuable career.
“Te Whatu Ora has also seen how much of an impact pharmacists have on the healthcare of our communities and recently funded training for more pharmacists to prescribe medicines – known as pharmacist prescribers.”
This shows that pharmacy is a meaningful career with lifelong learning opportunities, he says, and he is elated to be appointed Dean so that he too might be able to contribute towards this important mahi.
Bruce has been with Otago for nearly nine years and co-leads the IMAGEOtago research group. While teaching he has maintained his registration and practice as a pharmacist specialising in mental health.
His research focus is on psychopharmacology and the underlying pathophysiology of severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and drug addiction with an emphasis on treatment-resistance.
He says his interest stems from a curiosity about why some people don’t respond to some of the drugs often used to treat mental health disorders.
“There’s still no practical way to predict exactly which drugs will work for any particular person and so my research is looking at the effects of certain drugs on people’s brains using magnetic resonance imaging,” Bruce says.
The research is vital to improving outcomes for people with mental health disorders and aims to decrease the time it takes to be successfully treated, he says.
Before returning to Otago in 2016, he was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland for about 10 years. Before that, he completed his undergraduate training in the School of Pharmacy followed by a PhD in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Otago. He then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where he also practised as a pharmacist.
~ Kōrero by the Division of Health Sciences Communications Adviser, Kelsey Swart.