Kwon Park

Kwon Park was born and raised on Jeju Island, south of Korea and pursued his undergraduate education at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, earning a B.S. in Biology. He moved to the United States and received a Ph.D. in Developmental Biology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati. During his postdoctoral research at Stanford University, he developed a keen interest in the interface between developmental biology and cancer biology. His laboratory at UVA builds genetically engineered models of lung cancer to understand how normal cells transform into cancer, how cancer cells appropriate the processes of early embryonic development, and what roles genetic mutations play in cancer evolution. The groundbreaking research in the Park Lab has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and American Cancer Society.