On Jan. 13, 2014, Gary K. Michelson, a retired orthopaedic spinal surgeon whose groundbreaking work generated more than 955 issued or pending patents worldwide, donated $50 million to the University of Southern California (USC) to fund the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience.

The center is the cornerstone of a new collaboration between the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering that aims to transform how research is conducted at the intersection of engineering and the life and biomedical sciences.