By Jim Rada
Taylor Wilson is a South Carolina girl, born and bred, who thought she would wind up in business and marketing. However, life, as it does, threw her a twist, and she followed her passion. It led her to become the director of government affairs for the South Carolina chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association.
“I don’t think I could have imagined me in this position,” Wilson said.
After graduating from the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business in 2007, she got a job in sales. “I worked in sales about seven days before I realized I didn’t like it,” Wilson said.
This led to the first change in her life when she decided to focus her talents toward helping nonprofit organizations. She worked in marketing and communications jobs with organizations in animal rescue as well as those that aimed to prevent teen pregnancy. She was proud of her work and discovered she also had a passion for advocacy.
Then life threw her another twist. She took a job as director of advocacy and communications with the Alzheimer’s Association, and, just a few months later, her grandmother was diagnosed with dementia. Wilson found herself becoming a caregiver.
“I had a front row seat for families who have to care for someone going through the financial, emotional and mental strain of being a caregiver to someone with dementia,” she said.
As a result, fighting dementia became personal for Wilson. She pushes for funding, grants, programs, research and anything else that will enhance our understanding of dementia and how to treat it.
Her own growth has been bolstered by leaders and scientists who have worked with her. Many of those mentors have been women. Wilson feels that there are a large number of women in the field of Alzheimer’s research, in part because the disease disproportionately affects women.
Earlier this year, South Carolina won the Alzheimer’s Association’s first-ever State Policy Achievement Award in recognition of policy accomplishments at the state level. “Our goals need to focus on early detection, diagnosis and disclosure to the patient,” Wilson said.
She helped get $10 million in research funding for Clemson, the University of South Carolina and the Medical University of South Carolina if the schools cooperated to help establish a joint research center. They share resources to further dementia research in a way they couldn’t have done alone. This has also allowed them to apply to the National Institute on Aging for a designation as an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center – the only one in the state. “We are changing the shape of dementia response in the state so that we are all singing from the same songbook,” Wilson said.
Wilson’s grandmother passed away in 2019, and because the disease was prevalent among her grandmother’s siblings, she worries it may present itself in her father and uncles and eventually her and her cousins.
“I worry, but there’s hope now,” Wilson said. “Where we are now with research is not where we were when I started in 2015.”
Taylor Wilson
Alzheimer’s Association
140 Stoneridge Drive #640, Columbia
803-791-3430
alz.org/sc
