Stacy Wu, MD, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals
Updated: October 11, 2021
2021 Outstanding Women in Business
Outstanding Women in Business: For Wu, neurology is a puzzle
Photo | Matt Wright
Stacy Wu, MD
For Stacy Wu, MD, vice president and head of global central nervous system clinical research at Sunovion, the switch from clinical practice to clinical research was all about impact.
While she enjoyed helping patients one at a time in her previous role, she found clinical research allowed her to help develop new therapies to have a broader reach and impact on a wider group of people.
“It really was very different than what I’d been doing previously,” Wu said.
Wu, who hails from southern New Jersey, grew up in a medical family. Her father, a pediatrician, harbored a lifelong dream that one of his children would follow in his footsteps and eventually take over his practice. That didn’t quite happen, but Wu and all of her siblings did become physicians – although that wasn’t Wu’s original plan.
After high school, Wu headed for Brown University in Rhode Island, where she wanted to study history and political science. On the side, though, she checked off pre-med requirements, just in case she changed her mind – which she did.
With a new plan in motion, Wu attended medical school at New York University, and then headed uptown for a neurology residency at Columbia University. After that, she completed a multiple sclerosis fellowship at the University Hospital of Basel in Switzerland, where she developed the rater training program for the most widely used MS rating scale, the Expanded Disability Status Scale, going on to serve as the rater trainer for pharmaceutical-sponsored MS clinical trials.
“The thing about neurology is I always thought it was a puzzle,” Wu said, explaining she liked the challenge. “I found it just very interesting to talk to the patients, see what their complaints are, do the physical exam, and try to get clues from what you do in the neurological examination.”
When she had the opportunity to join the team at Sunovion, she was excited. She’d been following news from the company, particularly with regard to its drug discovery processes.
At Sunovion, Wu works in late-stage development, meaning she’s in clinical trials with the patient population, and she works in both neurology and psychiatry.
“She leads by example,” said Lisa Curry, executive director and head of global project management at Sunovion. “She’s one that treats everybody as an equal.”
Wu is a role model, Curry said, and someone others around her aspire to emulate.
She enjoys collaborating with departments working at all stages in drug development, from research to commercial operations. It’s fulfilling for her to be able to see the big picture of what she and her team are working on at any given moment, as well as to access people in different departments and have her questions easily answered. It’s also essential to her job, as she’s tasked with helping to make sure that all teams are moving forward in the same direction.
As a leader in her company and her field, Wu believes in identifying and harnessing the strengths of those people around her. That includes mentoring and working with those in more junior positions and helping them find functional areas and projects which empower them to pursue their own skills and interests.
“I try to get to know each person based on what their skillset is, where do they want their career to go, where their interests lie,” Wu said, explaining she was mentored by an older woman physician during her career, something creating a lot of influence over her and her interest in helping others.
Curry and Wu are peers at Sunovion, and are working together on a drug development project at the company, which Wu leads and Curry manages. They have been colleagues for about a year and a half.
Wu, said Curry, excels at keeping those around her calm.
“For example, if she has to do a presentation and deliver news that may not be what people want to hear, she does it in such an objective manner and in such a calming way that because she exudes that, [she reassures that] everything’s going to be okay,” Curry said.
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