Program Overview

Do you want to learn how drugs work in the body, how they are discovered and developed for human use, and how they can sometimes have unwanted effects? Pharmacology is the scientific study of drugs or medicines and is therefore essential to all medical disciplines and the treatment of disease.

You’ll develop skills relevant to the pharmaceutical industry that will in-turn help to address global challenges, such as tackling antibiotic resistance. Alternatively, your interests may lie in discovering new drugs to treat Ebola and Covid-19; Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease; and diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

In addition to being provided with a broad knowledge and understanding of the principal body systems, processes and functions in health and disease, you will have the opportunity to discover and explore individual areas of pharmacology in more depth such as psychopharmacology, antiviral therapy, cancer therapy and molecular pharmacology for example.

Our focus will be on making you workplace ready, equipped with the knowledge, skills and attributes required to succeed in whatever career you choose to go onto. To showcase your knowledge to potential employers, you will undertake a capstone or culminating research project, where you will bring together the knowledge, skills and attributes developed throughout your degree and apply it with ultimate aim of creating a solution to this problem.

You will be involved in active learning approaches including critical thinking, creative problem solving, team-working and mini-projects to progressively develop the key skills and attributes required by Pharmacology graduates.

This integrated Masters (MBiol) gives you an additional year of specialist training. You will study advanced research topics and undertake your own extended research project within one of the major research laboratories in the School of Biomedical Sciences or an appropriate period of work based practice. You may also choose to apply for our 3 year BSc and transfer to an MBiol up until the end of your second year, subject to suitable academic performance.

Course highlights

• Designed to give a broad scientific foundation and key graduate skills for those interested in pharmacology.
• Benefit from our pharmaceutical industry partnerships through guest lectures from international companies such as Labcorp and AstraZeneca.
• Delivered using inspirational, engaging and inclusive approaches. Develop the key skills and attributes of a global graduate, able to contribute biomedical solutions to the global challenges facing humankind.
• Develop experimental skills in specialised laboratories. Experimental skills modules throughout the first 2 years train you to identify problems, design and conduct experiments to find answers to key biomedical and pharmacological questions.
• The opportunity to undertake an extended capstone research project under the supervision of a field-leading academic, further developing the key skills and attributes that will set you apart in the graduate job market and in application for postgraduate research degrees (e.g. PhD).