Rate My Professor Rhys Ponton

Rhys Ponton is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Auckland, where he joined in 2016. He is an experienced pharmacist and academic with three decades of work across clinical pharmacy, research, and teaching. Ponton completed his PhD at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom in 2006; his doctoral thesis was titled Evidence-based Harm Reduction and examined the risks posed by injections. He also completed a Pharmacist Independent Prescriber Course at the University of Bath in 2007.

Ponton’s research explores the intersection of pharmacy, public health, and drug policy, with a particular focus on understanding patterns of drug use, harm reduction, and the risks of recreational drugs. He has extensive teaching experience at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and maintains a career-long commitment to pharmacy education, covering topics such as drug use and harm reduction, mental health and psychiatry, and pharmacist prescribing. He has contributed to publications including the 2021 paper Why do pharmacists leave the profession? A mixed-methods study and the 2020 paper Pharmaceutical opioid changes risk overdose increase in NZ. Ponton has engaged in public outreach, including discussions on harm reduction approaches at events such as Raising the Bar.