From a pony to a professorship: an unexpected journey

“I could have been a top-notch groom,” says Professor Judith McCool, talking about her unconventional career path from sixth form school leaver to internationally renowned public health academic.

“Instead, here I am and I have a dream job.” 

It was a circuitous path via a number of casual jobs, including one in a dental practice, and a BA majoring in sociology and American film. 

“I applied for a job as a polo rider,” the now Head of the School of Population Health and Director of the Centre for Pacific and Global Health Scientists told a packed lecture theatre at her inaugural lecture.

Jude describes a farming childhood in rural Manawatu with five siblings, attendance at Bunnythorpe Primary and St Peter’s College in Palmerston North, and years where she rode horses, enjoyed history, and gained a certificate for proficiency in Pitman elementary typing.

Academia was about as far from her life plans as moon walking – though terrestrial travel was top of mind. As soon as she had money for a ticket, and just before her 18th birthday, Jude headed for Europe.

Back in New Zealand, ostensibly for a short visit after her sister had a baby, Jude instead enrolled in a BA. The route from sociology to being a Head of School at the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, and Director of a renowned Pacific-focussed research centre was, as she describes it, “unexpected".

She remembers asking one of her lecturers at the end of her bachelors degree: “What does one do with a degree in sociology?” and being told: “If I had my time again I would have done medicine.”

That didn’t seem particularly helpful at the time, Jude says, but it got her thinking about medicine-adjacent careers, including public health. She enrolled at the University of Otago’s public health masters programme, and afterwards found a job analysing data on young people’s behaviour around tobacco use at the Hugh Adam Cancer Epidemiology Unit.

“We were seeing a huge increase in young people smoking, but none of the explanations – like parental smoking, or rebelliousness in their personality – were particularly compelling, at least to me,“ she says.

Instead, she started to wonder about the pictures in the magazines she flicked through during her breaks – images of cool young people with cigarettes.

Jude noticed the same thing in movies.

“It was the 1990s but the amount of smoking in films was back to levels we’d seen in the 1960s. I wondered if the way the film industry and popular culture was presenting tobacco might or might not be contributing to young people smoking.”

And suddenly, the young Jude had a use for that sociology and American film degree – her PhD was entitled “Adolescent perceptions of smoking imagery in film”.

She had also found her calling: public health research, with a particular emphasis on non-communicable diseases.

Over the next few years, Jude took an increasingly nuanced look at the impact of seeing cigarettes in movies on smokers, examining the differences between young and older people, men and women, and people of different ethnicities. And she started to look at the role of the tobacco industry behind the scenes.

It’s a role that’s still influential today, she told the audience at her inaugural lecture. “It’s reinventing itself in the tobacco companies’ market strategies around vaping.”

In 2008, Jude took her first foray into global public health, with an invitation to travel to Durban for a World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

Later, in 2019, she was a member of the New Zealand delegation to the World Health Assembly in Geneva with Ashley Bloomfield, now Sir Ashley, but then New Zealand’s relatively unknown Director-General of Health.

She points to a photo from the conference (below).

“I like that one where I am supervising Ashley, to make sure he’s getting it right!" 

Soon she was doing more and more work in the Pacific, including living for a time in Samoa with her young family. There she looked at ways of strengthening the health research capacity in the Pacific – something that still occupies a lot of her time today.

In New Zealand, Jude took on a wide variety of projects – from eye health with the Fred Hollows Foundation, to a study of the risks and responsibilities of students doing medical electives. She worked on mobile phone tobacco cessation programmes in Samoa, ran workshops in Fiji, and looked at digital inclusion in Niuean families during Covid.

Then her biggest project so far: setting up the Centre for Pacific and Global Health-Te Poutoko Ora a Kiwa, alongside Niue-born Sir Collin Tukuitonga. The centre was officially opened in April 2023.

“Here we are as the largest university in New Zealand, strong connections to the Pacific… and notwithstanding the important work going on in Pacific Studies and elsewhere across the University, there was nothing pulling it together,” Jude says. 

“It was really clear: we needed to build and grow research leadership, particularly among young people, in areas of strategic importance, particularly around non-communicable diseases, climate change and the impact on health, pandemic responses, and children’s, women’s and young people’s health," Jude says. "These remain the priorities for the group.”

Sir Collin says Jude, a Pākehā New Zealander, has been instrumental.

“I didn’t think we had a hope in hell of getting [Te Poutoko] based here,” he says. “We would never have been successful without Jude’s work. She gives it substance, credibility and meaning.”

Jude says it could have ended up as “just another average research centre”; instead the goal is “doing something that actually makes a difference”. 

Sir Ashley Bloomfield, now Professor at the School of Population Health, agreed to be Te Poutoko’s Governing Council Chair.

"It’s not easy work, and we are going through hard times at the moment,” Jude says. “But here I am and I’m OK with that. It’s a great role.”