Rate My Professor Polly Tenci

Dr. Polly Tenci serves as a Medical Officer at the University of Otago Student Health Services in Dunedin, having joined the team in 2026. In this role, she provides medical care to students as part of the doctors team within a department that offers comprehensive health supports, including general practice, nursing, and mental health services to the university community. She has a special interest in sexual health and wellbeing and works part-time at the Dunedin Sexual Health Clinic.

During her medical training at the University of Otago, Polly Tenci received the Te Tohu Wai Certificate of Excellence in Palliative Medicine in her fifth year of the MBChB program, as recognized at the 2021 Awards Ceremony Hui Whakanui Tauira. As a Trainee Intern at the Dunedin School of Medicine, she served as joint first author, alongside Professor Lianne Parkin, on the study 'COVID-19 among University of Otago students living in North Dunedin households in the first half of 2022: was the prevalence underestimated?', published in the New Zealand Medical Journal in 2023. This collaborative research with fellow trainee interns investigated COVID-19 prevalence in student households. Earlier, supported by a School of Biomedical Sciences Summer Research Scholarship in the Department of Physiology, she performed experiments contributing to the publication 'Retromer is involved in epithelial Na+ channel trafficking' by Cheung et al., published in the American Journal of Physiology-Renal Physiology in 2020. The study demonstrated the retromer complex's role, along with associated WASH and CCC complexes, in recycling epithelial sodium channels (ENaC) from endosomes to the plasma membrane using cell models, knockdown techniques, and electrophysiological measurements.