My name is Drake Smith.
We're here in Lili Yang's lab in UCLA.
I am a second year PhD student and we work on engineering immunity in this lab, specifically
we genetically engineer the immune system to try and make it better at fighting diseases
such as autoimmune disease and cancer.
So I grew up in Idaho on a farm.
Grew up in Idaho and then moved to Utah to do my undergraduate degree and then I moved
here to UCLA for my PhD.
I'm a scientist because I find it interesting.
I mean grade school really all subjects interested me but science was the subject that really
sparked my interest because you weren't just learning something that somebody else that
learned.
You were also discovering something.
That's really why I was attracted to research.
It's because you're not reading something in a book that someone else figured out.
You actually get to figure out something new.
When I do research I am the first person in the world to know something and that's probably
the most exciting feeling I've ever had.
So we'll go straight and the first thing you have is the four and it's side scattered...
Neither of my parents are scientists.
My dad is a farmer and my mom is a CNA.
Most of my family have gone into business or medicine but I think I'm one of the only
actual PhD students in heart science and research.
P6 in P11, which is high in protein.
So as far as my interest in science, I've always really been interested in the science.
Probably when I first started watching Bill Nye the Science Guy.
I'm definitely one of his acolytes.
So I remember watching the videos and renting all of them to watch them and again it was
being able to learn something new and then figuring out how something worked.
So I'm actually not very good at math.
Calculus 2 is probably the hardest class I had ever took in college.
I almost failed it.
I am okay at basic math but I am, it's definitely not one of my strong suites and that's part
of the reason actually in why I'm in biology is it doesn't require as much math as say
chemistry or physics.
I can definitely say to people that as long as you can pass your classes, you'll be fine.
So when I first went into science I was actually doing very basic science on enzyme research
and this was just a pursuit for knowledge.
I went into this research because I wanted to do something more translational, something
more applicable and now I work on actual cancer treatment.
A lot of people in my family have cancer but I wouldn't say that's my actual motivation.
I'm more motivated again for the thirst for knowledge so that's why doing the research
before and very basic research and research now I've got the same level of interest in
just figuring out how things work.
So in the lab I mostly deal with culturing cells and doing flow cytometry to analyze
these cells.
The overall mission of all of this is to come up with a novel immunotherapy treatment for
cancer.
That's my specific goal in the lab is to try to come up with a new treatment for cancer
utilizing the body's own immune system.
But there's been a lot of work already trying to modulate our own immune systems against
cancer.
There's many many clinical trials done.
There's many successful clinical trials.
My treatment focus is on a new type of immune cell that isn't studied as much and hasn't
been utilized or seen its full potential yet.
So I focus on this cell because we think it could be more of a universal treatment and
able to treat multiple cancers instead of having to develop a specific treatment for
each kind of cancer.
The biggest thrill of my life is that when I do discover something when no one else has
ever known that.
Again when I do that experiment and see that result and I know that I am the first ever
to ever see that and ever know that is a huge thrill and then being able to present that
and show that to other people and teach somebody something, not just that I learned somewhere
else but that I found out and that I'm actually teaching them a new thing.
That's my motivation to people.