Hai Yao, Ph.D.
SC TRIMH Principal Investigator and Program Director
Ernest R. Norville Endowed Chair in Biomedical Engineering and Professor in Bioengineering
The SC TRIMH Center, a National Institutes of Health Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) funded by NIH/NIGMS (P20GM121342) in 2018 and currently in its Phase 2, is dedicated to enhancing and expanding the Biomedical Research capacity at Clemson University and the state of South Carolina to promote outstanding multidisciplinary, collaborative, and translational research in musculoskeletal and related diseases. The Center is led by a leadership team with multidisciplinary expertise coalescing resources and disciplines from Clemson University School of Health Research (CUSHR) in collaboration with Prisma Health, and the Medical University of South Carolina.
Our primary mission is to develop a new generation of NIH-funded investigators by providing the intellectual expertise needed for one-on-one and group mentoring opportunities to early stage and/or new investigators, financial support for investigators to obtain preliminary data and research infrastructure, and research cores with needed expertise and capabilities.
The specific aims are to: Aim 1. Expand the critical mass of funded investigators conducting musculoskeletal research to implement the concept of virtual human trials for the development of new devices, interventions, and therapeutics in bone and joint disorders. Aim 2. Strengthen innovative scientific cores that support and advance musculoskeletal research to serve RPLs to compete successfully for NIH funding and forge collaborative ties with investigators statewide with relevant research interests. These cores also facilitate the expansion of the center, as magnets for other PIs to work in this area. Aim 3. Advance the ongoing development of an independent, sustainable, multidisciplinary thematic program. Through world-class core resources and a robust thematic research program, SC TRIMH aims to assume an international leadership role in musculoskeletal translational research. Using the musculoskeletal system as a model, SC-TRIMH will promote a new paradigm for translational research, i.e. virtual human trial, which will dramatically reduce costs and speed up both innovation and translation to obtain better health outcomes.
