Meet Dr. TS Park
A Brief Bio:
After graduating from the Yonsei University College of Medicine in Seoul, Korea, in 1971, Dr. Park completed his neurosurgery residency at Yonsei and received first place in the board certification examination by the Korean Board of Neurological Surgery. He moved to the University of Virginia in 1976, and after six additional years of residencies and fellowships, Dr. Park scored in the 100th percentile in the written examination of the American Board of Neurological Surgery.
Dr. Park has made pioneering improvements to several neurosurgical procedures for children, most notably the selective dorsal rhizotomy (SDR). In 1986, he started the SDR program to improve walking in children who suffer from spastic cerebral palsy. Today, he has performed SDR surgery on more than 4,000 children and young adults from 72 countries. His improved surgical technique and patients have been featured in Time magazine and on CNN, NBC and the BBC.
Always interested in the long-term progress of his patients, Dr. Park has created a Facebook page for SDR to stay connected to his domestic and international dorsal rhizotomy patients. His Facebook page now has more than 10,000 members, and he has been instrumental in the creation of an international network of SDR Facebook pages in the United States, Canada, England, Wales, Scotland, Israel, Ireland, Hungary, Sweden, Brazil, Poland and Korea.
Dr. Park received a seven-year Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to fund his laboratory research from 1999-2007. He was honored with the most prestigious award given to neurosurgeons, the H. Richard Winn, MD, Prize for Meritorious Research from the Society of Neurological Surgeons in 2008, and he received the Distinguished Faculty Clinician Award from Washington University School of Medicine in 2011. He serves on the American Board of Medical Specialties, the American Board of Neurological Surgery and the American Board of Pediatric Neurosurgery. He was an editorial board member of Journal of Neurosurgery, Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics and Child’s Nervous System. He has written 42 chapters and 188 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has edited four books.
Dr. Park’s laboratory work initially focused on the role of adenosine in the regulation of cerebral blood flow in newborns. His laboratory was the first to demonstrate evidence that linked some chemical mediators to blood-brain barrier breakdown during post-asphyxic restoration of the flow of blood in the newborn.
He and his wife, Meeaeng, have two children.
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*updated the number of patients treated to 4,000 across 72 countries since the original article was published in 2013, and added in the development of the Canadian SDR facebook page (Support 4 SDR in Ontario).