David Park, MD, PhD, is a neurosurgeon who graduated medical school from the Catholic University of Korea in Seoul, South Korea. He then completed his internship and residency training in the Department of Neurosurgery, Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital. He became a board-certified neurosurgeon in South Korea in 2014 and then completed his 2-year fellowship in the same hospital in the fields of Brain tumor surgery and Skull base surgery. During his residency training, he was selected to attend graduate school while practicing neurosurgery as a trainee. He focused on combination therapy using engineered stem cells along with the conventional treatment, and successfully defended his PhD 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. He worked as a clinical fellow (clinical associate) for one year in the National Neuroscience Institute, focusing on Neurosurgical Oncology and Skull base surgery.
In 2017, Dr. Park then joined Dr. Christian Badr’s lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, as a postdoctoral research fellow to perform translational research on glioblastoma to complement his clinical expertise. His research focused on the role of fatty acids and lipid metabolism in glioblastoma. During this one-year postdoc research fellowship, he could successfully show that certain fatty acids can accelerate tumor growth in mouse orthotopic glioma models and identified a desaturase enzyme as a key in this process.
During this period, in addition to his work in the lab, Dr. Park launched his own start-up business based on his invention. He came up with the idea of a real-time intraoperative diagnostic tool for tumor detection during glioma surgery. The tool is a diagnostic device that uses intrinsic fluorescence spectroscopy on top of fluorescence imaging to improve the detection of residual tumors during glioma surgery in a very practical way. He collaborated with bioengineers at M.I.T. to develop a prototype and received seed funding from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund. As an MIT Sandbox program alumnus, he continues to work on this project.
In 2020, Dr. Park joined the North Shore University Hospital, Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Long Island, New York, as a Neurosurgical Oncology Fellow (Teaching Associate). During this one-year fellowship, he worked with Dr. Michael Schulder with a focus on brain tumor surgery including laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT) and stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS). He could perform brain tumor surgeries using the diverse tools, such as, microscope, endoscope, exoscope and fluorescence guidance.
From July 2021 to June 2022, Dr. Park completed a Neurosurgical Oncology and Radiosurgery Fellowship 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 guidance of Drs. Gene Barnett, Lilyana Angelov, and Ali Mohammadi.
In July 2022, Dr. Park joined the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University as a Clinical Instructor. Dr. Park now works with Drs. Steven D. Chang and Antonio Meola in the field of Cyberknife stereotactic radiosurgery and Neurosurgical oncology.