Yili Xu’s career has spanned the globe from China to California and shifted between medicine, academic research, and the pharmaceutical industry. Here, we ask Yili to share her journey and to discuss the lessons and values that helped shape it.

How would you describe your current role?

I would consider myself a researcher at a pharmaceutical company. I’m a lab person, so I design experiments to answer questions related to an ongoing project or to overcome challenges and move projects forward.

My day-to-day routine involves mostly the designing, setting up, and performance of experiments. There’s also a lot of communication with other research scientists, managers and project leaders to discuss what the data we generate means for our next steps.

What would you say is the best part of your job?

Problem solving! I’ll talk about it later, but I was a doctor in China before coming to the US. So, the possibility of helping patients and solving issues has always attracted me. Helping our projects move forward and the company finally develop a drug to treat patients—that’s my passion.

What has your career path looked like, and how did you get to where you are today?

I grew up in China. I got my medical degree there, but because the Chinese education system works differently than the American system, it’s more of the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree. After graduating, I worked as a resident doctor in a hospital for almost five years.

When my husband moved to the US for his PhD program, I came with him and basically lost my career path. If I wanted to go down the medical path, it would have been hard because I needed financial support and would have had to do more training. Instead, I was lucky to find a job right away in Dermatology at Thomas Jefferson University studying genetic diseases. The research attracted me because it related to my past experiences in medicine and allowed me to explore how to research how we contract these diseases and how we can help patients using new technologies.

But finishing school doesn’t mean you’re done learning. I took classes at Thomas Jefferson on how to use a computer and things like Excel and Microsoft Word. I also learned most lab techniques by taking classes about the principles and methodologies of laboratory work. Maybe I wasn’t the best student because I didn’t know English very well at that time, but I still  learned a lot and I also learned from my mistakes, my coworkers, and different working experiences.

I worked at Thomas Jefferson University for another five years until my husband found his first job in industry in the San Francisco Bay Area. We moved here together, and I looked for a job as research associate at a biotech or a pharmaceutical company.  I have worked at several companies since then. One of my jobs involved working on a flu vaccine that used attenuated alive combined viruses. These attenuated viruses have been modified with a temperature-sensitive gene so that they die at body temperature. That was an amazing experience because of the sense of accomplishment that came with it. We could help prevent people from getting the flu! Now, I have been involved in the drug safety field more than 14 years, evaluating the toxicity and potential efficacy of small molecules for drug development.  

While previously I wasn’t financially able to go back to school, in 2019 I was finally able to take advantage of an MBA program offered by my company in cooperation with Golden Gate University, and I earned my master’s degree in 2021. I didn’t pursue this learning experience to boost my scientific knowledge. Instead, it has helped me better understand how my company operates and what its focuses are.

What’s the biggest challenge you have faced?

Critical thinking. Detailed methodologies are important to follow and important to design. But true critical thinking requires a deeper understanding of how the pieces of what you’re doing are connected in order to design an experiment to solve a bigger-picture problem.

What’s the biggest piece of advice you would give to your past self or to someone looking to follow in your footsteps?

While following your career path, you need to have a guiding passion. There are always bad days at work. Without passion, how do you keep going? Figure out what excites you and go for it.

What are some of your other interests outside work?

I also volunteer for an organization that mentors high school students and encourages them to go to college. Guiding students in that direction can be hard, but I try to listen and answer their questions and help when they need it. The two mentees I have had have both gone to college, one of them wants to become a nurse!