Rake Wu

“ Hi everyone, my name is Rake Wu. My son, Ethan, is a second grader at Hardy.When I was young, I liked to make unique things and ran interesting experiments in the lab.  I then became a chemist after a few years of training. I now work at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research as a drug discovery scientist. My work is to discover new drugs for patients to make them feel better when they are sick. In order to make a drug, we need to identify the target, which is the cause of the sickness, and then we will try to find a solution, which is the drug, to make people feel better and recover from the sickness. You can imagine that when you were sick, there is a lock in your body that needs to be opened. Part of my work is to design and create that key to open the lock. During this process, it is like solving puzzles. We need to come out with many ideas and test them in the right way and get the results. We then analyze the result(data) and come out with more ideas to answer other questions.  After doing this for many times, we will have a chance to discover a drug for patients. I like to solve puzzles and I find it particularly exciting if something I do have the potential to improve people’s life quality! We are going to have a lot of fun in this science event! Ethan and I are look forward to it!”