Since graduating from Scheller College with a degree in industrial management in 1973, Larry Huang’s entrepreneurial spirit has led him to many roles: co-founder of the Ciena Corporation, race car driver, and philanthropist, supporting the Huang Executive Education Center in Scheller College and endowing the Lawrence P. Huang Chair in Engineering Entrepreneurship at Georgia Tech.
His most recent entrepreneurial venture was connecting the Mayo Clinic to a team of interdisciplinary Capstone Design students at Georgia Tech, forging a new collaboration in the relationship between Mayo and Georgia Tech’s bio-community.
A true visionary, Larry saw beyond the recent construction dust of the Mayo Clinic’s $330 million campus expansion in Jacksonville, Florida; he saw opportunity. “You can have all the intellectual property, the clinicians, the technical and scientific knowledge, but in order to build a product or a service, you need engineers and a business plan,” Larry noted. As a clinic patient himself and supporter of Mayo Clinic Ventures, Larry took it upon himself to arm the clinic with the engineering and business expertise at Georgia Tech.
Larry brought Mayo’s planners together with Institute leadership, including Scheller College of Business Dean Maryam Alavi, Petit Institute Executive Director Bob Guldberg, and James Rains, who directs the Capstone program for the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University. The selected Capstone student team focused their work on innovating the epidural procedure. Read more about their project and Larry’s impact here.