Dr Dagan Lonsdale, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics and Consultant Intensivist talks about his clinical academic pathway at St George’s.
Dr Dagan Lonsdale, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics and Consultant Intensivist
Why did you choose to apply for an academic clinical fellowship (ACF) at St George’s?
I was halfway through my foundation training and wanted to explore combining clinical work in one of the acute (ACCS) specialties with an academic career. At the time St George’s was offering an NIHR fellowship with this combination. Professor Emma Baker was the supervisor of the academic stream of the fellowship. My memory is a bit hazy but I think her phone number was on the details of the fellowship and I just called her up for a chat! I was taken by the enthusiasm she had for academic training at St George’s and that sealed it for me. I applied and was lucky enough to be appointed.
How have you developed your academic career?
In short through a tremendous amount of being in the right place at the right time and having extremely supportive mentors (chief among them Emma Baker)!
Professor Baker is a clinical pharmacologist and despite my clinical desire to practice intensive care, I was hooked into the specialty. At the time, dual clinical training in intensive care and any medical specialty was possible and I followed my colleague Dr Andrew Hitchings to become the second UK clinical pharmacologist-intensivist. I spent a year after my academic fellowship working at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s hospital in Queensland Australia, which just happened to be a world leading centre for the study of antimicrobial pharmacokinetics in adult critical illness. Professors Jason Roberts and Jeff Lipman encouraged me to pursue a research career in the field.
On my return to the UK I took up a second fellowship with Professor Baker. She introduced me to Professor’s Joe Standing and Mike Sharland who were starting a research programme into antimicrobial pharmacokinetics in neonatal, paediatric and adult critical illness. I was invited to join the team and completed my PhD running the clinical elements of this project alongside Dr Karin Kipper who was a post-doctoral analytical chemist making novel assays to measure antibiotics. The PhD not only combined my interest in clinical pharmacology and intensive care, but also allowed me to pursue further development of my passion for mathematics. I learned state-of-the-art pharmacokinetic modelling techniques to understand the effect of critical illness on the pharmacokinetics of the drugs we studied. In this project we demonstrated under-dosing of antibiotics in critical illness across age groups.
Working as a clinical pharmacologist also allowed me to develop my passion for and interest in education. I taught clinical pharmacology and prescribing to MB BS undergraduates and teamed up with Emma, Andrew and another academic fellow, Dan Burrage, to write ’The Top 100 Drugs’ - which has gone on to become the UKs best-selling clinical pharmacology text, and recommended reading for multiple courses (MBBS and other healthcare courses) across the country. I led the delivery of the University’s prescribing exam and completed the PGCert in healthcare education during my fellowship.
How has your fellowship shaped the job you are in now?
I am now a senior lecturer in clinical pharmacology and consultant intensivist. I spend half of my time working clinically in St George’s hospital general intensive care and half of my time working in the University where I am the lead for pharmacokinetics teaching on the BSc in Clinical Pharmacology. I continue to conduct research into critical illness pharmacokinetics and collaborate with Emma, Joe, Jason, Jeff and Andrew (and pretty much everyone else I have worked with during my fellowship) on various projects. Most recently this includes work on covid-19 viral kinetics. My work on critical illness pharmacokinetics has also meant I have been lucky enough to be invited to work on other interesting projects, including as an editor of ‘critical illness’ a guide to prescribing in critical care by the Pharmaceutical press.
In short, none of this would have happened without my fellowship and the encouragement and mentorship of my supervisors at St George’s. I’m extremely grateful to all of them, and very glad I applied to come to St George’s!