Bio
Dr. David Park, MD, PhD, is a neurosurgeon who graduated from medical school at the Catholic University of Korea in Seoul, South Korea. He completed his internship and residency training in the Department of Neurosurgery at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital. He became a board-certified neurosurgeon in South Korea in 2014 and subsequently completed a 2-year fellowship at the same hospital, specializing in brain tumor surgery and skull base surgery. During his residency, he also attended graduate school while practicing neurosurgery as a trainee and successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, titled “Combination therapy for gliomas using temozolomide and interferon-beta secreting human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells,” in 2015.
After completing his fellowship in South Korea, Dr. Park moved to Singapore in 2016 and worked as a Clinical Fellow (Clinical Associate) at the National Neuroscience Institute for one year, focusing on Neurosurgical Oncology and Skull Base Surgery.
In 2017, Dr. Park joined Dr. Christian Badr’s lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, conducting translational research on glioblastoma and studying the role of fatty acids and lipid metabolism in glioblastoma to complement his clinical expertise.
During this time, Dr. Park also launched a startup based on his invention of an intraoperative diagnostic tool for tumor detection during glioma surgery. He collaborated with bioengineers at M.I.T. to develop a prototype and secured seed funding from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program. As an alumnus of the MIT Sandbox program, he continues to develop this project.
In 2020, Dr. Park served as a Neurosurgical Oncology and Radiosurgery Fellow (Teaching Associate) for a year at North Shore University Hospital, Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, in Long Island, New York, where he worked with Dr. Michael Schulder on brain tumor surgery including advanced techniques, such as Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy (LITT) and Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS).
From July 2021 to June 2022, he completed another fellowship in Neurosurgical Oncology and Radiosurgery at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland. He devoted his efforts to minimally invasive neurosurgical techniques such as LITT and Gamma Knife SRS, as well as awake brain tumor surgery under the guidance of Drs. Gene Barnett, Lilyana Angelov, and Ali Mohammadi.
As of July 2022, Dr. Park joined the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University as a Clinical Instructor, working with Dr. Steven D. Chang in the fields of Neurosurgical Oncology and CyberKnife SRS. As of July 2024, he has been promoted to Clinical Assistant Professor in the same field.
