We recently spoke with several members of our drug discovery (DDAG) team to understand their perspectives on why they chose to pursue their drug discovery careers at Schrödinger. In these conversations, several themes stood out that center on Schrödinger’s work environment, the power of the Schrödinger technology in drug discovery and the overall commitment of the DDAG team toward a common goal: to help find much needed treatments for patients.
Schrödinger is not a small biotech and is not big pharma – instead, the company brings together the best aspects of both those environments.
“At a startup, sometimes you feel like you have to take on everything. There’s a little bit of everything that every early employee has to do. But here at Schrödinger, that isn’t really the case. There’s multiple people that you can go to on your team, whether it’s a chemistry question, biology question, a question about oncology or immunology.” – Sarah Silvergleid, Biologist & Competitive Intelligence Lead
“The difference between working for a large pharma company and Schrödinger is quite obvious – I would say the biggest difference might be in decision-making. Big pharma tends to have fairly rigid management structures so decision-making tends to be quite slow and very top-down. At Schrödinger, we don’t have such rigid management structures, so decision-making is usually quite swift.” – Wayne Tang, Executive Director, Medicinal Chemistry
“I started out working at a big pharma and, based on my own experience, I feel like the biggest difference between big pharma and the experience I have at Schrödinger is how I have been enabled and given flexibility. I feel like as a scientist, as a biologist, I am far more enabled and given a lot more freedom in terms of making decisions on how to design the most appropriate experiment to address the most critical questions.” – Wu Yin, Senior Director
Our team empowers each other every day and acts as a support system in ways that make us want to come to work and be the best that we can be.
“We’ve assembled a group of scientists that are deep domain experts in their various disciplines across a very wide variety of areas.” – Hamish Wright, Vice President, Translational Science
“From my previous job and managers, they are there to supervise and to make sure you perform. At Schrödinger, it is totally different. The managers are there to support and to empower.” – Wayne Tang, Executive Director, Medicinal Chemistry
“Drug discovery projects here at Schrödinger are very team focused. It’s both the combination of just being a good team member and as well as the potential to discover a new medicine. And so it’s very much like a family.”- Andrew Placzek, Principal Scientist
We have a platform of unprecedented strength, and a commitment to use that strength in drug discovery.
“We really do have a platform that enables us to design really good molecules in an unprecedented way.” – Sarah Silvergleid, Biologist & Competitive Intelligence Lead
“There are still many cancer indications that we cannot treat. I really want to help. With our work, I hope one day we can bring compounds to the market to help patients with this terrible disease. And as a scientist, I strongly believe one day we can cure cancer as a whole.”- Wayne Tang, Executive Director, Medicinal Chemistry
Finally, we are a team of drug hunters who have the right tools and team at our disposal to work toward a common goal of bringing meaningful change to patients.
“The hardest part of what we do is understanding the biology, where biology is working well and the pathophysiology where biology is falling apart. There are inflection points and in our learnings around biology and the ability to capitalize on those inflection points, agnostic of therapeutic area, agnostic of disease that you’re treating,. It gives you much more opportunity and it provides the best possible outcomes for patients in the long term.” – Hamish Wright, Vice President, Translational Science
“My goal has been consistent from the beginning all the way until today. I wanted to be part of a group, that I can proudly say that I was involved in developing a medicine that really benefits patients.” – Wu Yin, Senior Director
Our DDAG team is made up of passionate scientists, strategic thinkers and brilliant minds that come to Schrödinger everyday excited by the potential of our technology and what it can help us achieve in drug discovery. These conversations validated what we as Schrödinger employees already know – that this is a one-of-a-kind company with limitless opportunities for its employees and we hope for patients with unmet medical needs.
