# David Huang (ophthalmologist)

David Huang (born 1964) is a Taiwanese-American ophthalmologist, biomedical engineer, and inventor. Huang is known for being a co-inventor of optical coherence tomography (OCT)...

## Biography
### Early Life and Education

David Huang was born in 1964 in Chiayi, Taiwan. He moved to the United States at age 12 and attended Avoca Central School in upstate New York. Huang later attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and majored in electrical engineering, earning his BS in 1985. He then earned his MS from MIT in the same field in 1989. Huang then earned his MD-PhD through the Harvard-MIT joint program in Health Science & Technology in 1993.

### Career

Huang completed his medical internship at Mercy Hospital in San Diego in 1994, before moving to the University of Southern California to complete his ophthalmology residency in 1997. Huang completed his cornea, external diseases, and refractive surgery fellowship at Emory University in 1998. Following this, he worked in the Cleveland Clinic until 2004 as an associative staff in refractive surgery, cornea, and biomedical engineering. Huang then took on a role as Associate Professor of Ophthalmology and Biomedical Engineering at USC and Medical Director of the Doheny Laser Vision Center until 2010.
David Huang is a board-certified ophthalmologist and currently the Director of Research and Associate Director of the Casey Eye Institute of the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). He is also the director of the Center for Ophthalmic Optics & Lasers, a research group that works on novel OCT imaging and laser therapeutic technologies for clinical applications. He is the Wold Family Chair in Ophthalmologic Imaging and a professor of ophthalmology and biomedical engineering at the OHSU School of Medicine.
Huang is an inventor and holds 44 U.S. patents in the areas of OCT, OCT angiography, laser therapeutics, tissue engineering, and smartphone eye screening.
Huang co-founded two companies. GoCheck Kids provides smartphone apps that screen young children for potential vision and hearing problems. The apps have been used to screen more than 6 million children. Unfold Therapeutics, Inc. is developing a laser thermal conjunctivoplasty device$^{17}$ to treat conjunctivochalasis, a common cause of eye irritation associated with aging.

## Research
### Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT)

Optical coherence tomography is an imaging technique that Huang co-invented in collaboration with Eric Swanson and Dr. James Fujimoto, his PhD advisor, resulting in the publication of the article ‘Optical Coherence Tomography’ in 1991 in Science. This publication focused on the imaging potential for very small structures, specifically the retina and coronary artery plaque, due to its micrometer depth resolution. OCT utilizes light to view subsurface structures in the body. This has led to its application in many different medical fields. Usage of OCT is now considered standard of care within the clinical specialties of ophthalmologyand cardiology
Since the invention of OCT, Huang has worked to help further develop the technology and its clinical applications. He has contributed to the extensions of OCT technology such as polarization-sensitive OCT, corneal and anterior segment OCT, Doppler OCT, OCT angiography, and OCT optoretinography. His research group has applied these technologies to the diagnosis and management of retinal, optic nerve, and anterior segment diseases in the eye, as well as ocular manifestations of neurological diseases. He has published over 350 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals that have been cited over 66,000 times (H-index 99. He is a co-founder and president emeritus of the International Ocular Circulation Society

## Awards and Honors

* 2012 Champalimaud Vision Award
* 2013 Jonas Friedenwald Award, Association for Research in Vision & Ophthalmology
* 2017 Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ prize
* 2023 Induction to National Academy of Engineering
* 2023 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award
* 2023 National Medal of Technology and Innovation
* 2024 Induction to National Academy of Medicine
* 2024 Oregon History Maker, Oregon Historical Society
* 2025 Induction to the National Inventors Hall of Fame