Howard County residents Wonsook Kim and her husband, Thomas Clement, have donated $3.5 million to Howard Community College, where Clement teaches a course. The Korea-born couple emigrated more than 50 years ago. Photo courtesy of Howard Community College

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Inventor Thomas Clement and his wife, the artist Wonsook Kim, have reached that stage in life where one thinks about giving back to honor the people and organizations that made their lives so successful.

But while others in that stage are writing checks to their alumni associations or maybe underwriting a scholarship at their alma mater, the Clarksville couple is going a bit bigger.

Since 2024, they’ve given $3.5 million to Howard Community College (HCC) — the college’s largest donation ever.

In return, HCC has named its science and engineering building in Clement’s honor. HCC President Daria Willis said she “could not be more excited about our relationship with this family and the long-term outcomes this gift will create.”

To Illinois State University, Kim’s alma mater, they’ve given $1 million to the engineering school and $12 million to fund what’s now called the Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts.

One reason they’re giving back, said Kim, is the opportunities the United States offered her and her husband, who were born in Korea.

“America is the best country there is,” she said.

Last December, the Community Foundation of Howard County honored them as its philanthropists of the year for 2025. Foundation President Melissa Curtin said, “Their vision and generosity have created a lasting impact.”

Teacher and artist

The couple, both in their early 70s, arrived in Howard County only three years ago, but Clement is already teaching an HCC class on invention and innovation.

It makes sense: He holds 78 patents and for 30 years ran a medical technology company he founded. Clement sold that company six years ago and plans to give away most of the profits from the sale.

For instance, Clement and Kim gave $1 million to provide free DNA test kits to Americans adopted from Korea and Korean War veterans. The kits have united more than 200 relatives already, Clement said.

Clement himself is a Korean War orphan, the offspring of a GI and a Korean mother who was likely forced by poverty to abandon him at age five.

He lived on the streets alongside other orphans in a life “all about survival,” he recalled. “Everybody in the same boat, hungry and cold.”

These street children were called “half and halfs,” he said, and were to be exterminated by the government for being only part Korean “until the American soldiers stepped in,” he said.

Clement was sent to an orphanage and later adopted by an American couple. In school in the United States, he said he struggled with the language barrier. “I thought I was just stupid; I didn’t realize it was a communication problem.”

So, he said, “I delved more into the nonverbal world. And in the world of innovation, you rely on the nonverbal world.”

An early example: Unable to keep up in sixth grade, he secretly built a terrarium inside his desk, complete with aquatic plants and a pond. When it leaked (and “smelled to high heaven,” he noted), the teacher was aghast. Then, Clement said, “he told me he thinks I’m a very smart person. I didn’t believe him.”

Art scholar

Kim, too, speaks of feeling like an outsider when she first came to the United States in 1972. After determinedly teaching herself English, she arrived in Illinois to study abroad. In Korea at that time, “an unmarried girl doesn’t go abroad,” she said.

She got an art scholarship to Illinois State, but “was always in the back” of the class, she said, which let her follow her own muse while other students were mainly into abstract work.

Next stop was New York City, where Kim got her first gallery show in 1977. She’s since exhibited in 67 galleries, from Dallas to Korea.

Many of her figurative paintings have folktale-like imagery. Her ceramics, too, have warmth: One is of a woman, her arms around a home as if it were a child.

Clement and Kim return to Korea often. In fact, they met there. They married more than 25 years ago, after getting to know each other when she was his interpreter during a visit to their homeland.

Community college champions

Clement said he has a soft spot for community colleges. As a high schooler, he got a 528 combined SAT score, so low that only the local community college would take him. There, he said, he took a course in which he tracked down for the class a somewhat-rare alpha-wave monitor. A professor lauded his determination.

Clement eventually transferred to Purdue and became an engineer, like his adoptive father. In 1988, he started a medical device company in his attic. When orders surged, he moved his company, Mectra, to a Bloomington, Ind., factory and “had to hire 87 people right away,” he said.

Some new hires had nontraditional backgrounds, but that didn’t deter him. “I overlook people’s challenges,” he said.

That includes low SAT scores. Kim recalled how her husband, in a speech to HCC students, mentioned his low score, and “They kind of sat up. They wanted to know: How’d you get here with that?”

The inventors’ club

Clement calls his HCC class an inventors’ club. Recently, students developed traps for the Spotted Lanternfly. If a prototype looks patentable, Clement promises to underwrite that cost and even the cost of commercializing the patent.

Clement tells his students to tinker with their prototypes, to behave like a child, when “everything’s a plaything,” as he put it.

“I’m a tinker,” he said. “I take things apart and put them together.”

Clement has been outspoken about his experiences and has written Dust of the Streets, a memoir that he said sold more than 25,000 copies.

A key memory, he recalled, is his first birthday party in the United States. There, as the children played, he instead “stood guard” over their presents — he couldn’t comprehend that life could be bountiful.

Now, he said, he and Kim are not “standing guard” over their bounty but sharing it. Looking at America’s income inequality, Clement said, “I’m baffled about how you could eat a sandwich next to a starving person.”