Today was a great day…I spent time interviewing Dr. Hai Yao and Dr. Jeremy Gilbert both endowed chairs for Clemson Bioengineering. Both men carrying on the legacy of a life long family friend Dr. Larry Dooley.

I have toured and spent time in the new MUSC-Clemson Bioengineering facility where Clemson Engineers are doing something that is hard to find in the United States; engineers conduction research and creating thought leadership in collaboration with an academic medical center.

Both Clemson and MUSC see this legacy as part of a larger vision, tackling some large medical problems in a fashion that pushes forward the movement to make South Carolina a destination for healthcare innovation.

It was a proud moment seeing the fruits of Dr. Dooley’s vision, one he talked about when I was a kid. Dr. Dooley’s vision and the hard work of Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Yao may seem abstract to the lay person when looking at their research posters, but after visiting their labs you can see the larger economic development vision growing with each beat of the cardiac stems cells being researched at 68 President Street in Charleston, SC.