David Huang, MD/PhD

Associate Director & Director of Research, Casey Eye Institute

Oregon Health and Science University

Keynote Speaker

Dr. David Huang is the Director of Research of Casey Eye Institute, the Wold Family Endowed Chair in Ophthalmic Imaging, and Professor of Ophthalmology and Biomedical Engineering at the Oregon Health & Science University. Dr. Huang leads the Center for Ophthalmic Optics and Lasers (www.COOLLab.net), which comprises 6 faculty members and more than 40 researchers engaged in both technology development and clinical research. He is a practicing ophthalmologist specializing in cornea and refractive surgery.

Dr. Huang is known for his innovations in applying laser and optical technology to eye diseases. He is a co-inventor of optical coherence tomography (OCT), a commonly used ophthalmic imaging technology with 40 million procedures performed annually worldwide. His seminal article on OCT, published in Science in 1991, has been cited more than 20,000 times. Dr. Huang contributed to many advancements in OCT technology and clinical applications, including polarization-sensitive OCT, anterior eye OCT, macular OCT for glaucoma evaluation, Doppler OCT for retinal blood flow measurement, and OCT angiography & optoretinography in eye diseases. He has published more than 360 peer-reviewed articles with over 70,000 citations (H-index 103) and holds 45 US patents. Dr. Huang has received the Champalimaud Vision Award, the Friedenwald Award from the Association for Research in Vision & Ophthalmology, the Russ Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award - one of the United States’ most prestigious biomedical research awards, and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation – the nation’s highest honor bestowed by the President on technology innovators. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, an inductee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and the American Ophthalmological Society. He is a cofounder of Gobiquity, maker of the GoCheck Kids smartphone app that has screened more than 7 million preschool children for vision and hearing problems.

Dr. Huang earned BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from MIT, and MD-PhD degrees from the joint Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program. He completed ophthalmology residency training at the Doheny Eye Institute/University of Southern California and cornea fellowship training at Emory University.

Nathan Selden, MD/PhD

Dean, School of Medicine

Oregon Health and Science University

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Nathan Selden, MD, PhD, is Dean of the School of Medicine, President of the OHSU Practice Plan, and Executive Vice President of OHSU.

Dr. Selden was appointed Dean on February 21, 2024. Prior to that time, he served for 8 years as Chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery. He continues to hold the Campagna Endowed Chair in Pediatric Neurosurgery. Dr. Selden's clinical practice focuses on surgery for childhood epilepsy, brain tumors, and congenital disorders. In 2006, he performed the first ever transplantation of neuronal stem cells in a human patient. An internationally known academic neurosurgeon, Dr. Selden has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications, edited a neurosurgical textbook series, and - with Nigel Nicholson, Dean Emeritus of Reed College - wrote a book in 2019 entitled “The Rhetoric of Medicine: Lessons on Professionalism from Ancient Greece”.

Selden also holds multiple national leadership roles. He is the immediate past-president of the Society of Neurological Surgeons, the oldest neurosurgical society in the world. He has also served as a Director and Vice-chair of the American Board of Neurological Surgery and as President of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. He was the founding national director of the neurosurgery boot camp courses and chaired the group that designed national training outcome measures - or milestones - for the United States. In 2013, he received the “Courage to Teach” Award from the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education, which accredits all residency and fellowship training programs nationwide. Raised in Portland, Dr. Selden is an avid hiker and skier. He obtained a bachelor's degree at Stanford University, a PhD in neuroscience at Cambridge University - where he was a British Marshall Scholar - and a Medical Degree from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Selden then trained in neurological surgery at the University of Michigan, followed by a fellowship in pediatric neurosurgery at Northwestern University, before returning home to Oregon and joining the OHSU faculty in 2000.

David Lewinsohn, MD/PhD

Director of the Center for Global Child Health Research

Oregon Health and Science University

Global Health Speaker

After receiving his B.S. in biology from Haverford College, David Lewinsohn attended Stanford University School of Medicine. In 1989 he received his Ph.D. in cancer biology and received his M.D. the same year. Dr. Lewinsohn was a Fellow of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, from 1993-1996, and a senior fellow and acting instructor from 1996-1998. During 1996-1998 he was also an investigator at the Infectious Disease Research Institute in Seattle, WA.

Lewinsohn's original experience in immunology focused on defining the role of the homing receptor L-selectin on neutrophil adhesion. However, since his pulmonary fellowship, he has been interested in the immune system's ability to detect and respond to the intracellular infection with Mtb. While it is clear that CD4+ T cells play a central role in the control of mycobacterial infection, CD8+ T cells are uniquely poised to recognize those cells harboring intracellular bacteria, such that these responses can be used as a surrogate for bacterial burden and/or infection. As a result, he has focused his work on understanding the mechanisms by which human CD8+ T cells can recognize cells harboring intracellular Mtb. He has focused on human, Mtb-specific T cells, and have defined HLA alleles used to present Mtb-derived antigen, have allowed for the definition of those antigens and epitopes that are presented, and have allowed for the analysis of the mechanisms by which Mtb-derived antigens are processed and presented.

His laboratory is run jointly with Dr. Deborah Lewinsohn, who is the Division Head of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, and whose interest has been in the immunology of pediatric TB, and the mechanisms underlying the susceptibility of young children to TB. As a result, the laboratory provides a rich environment spanning basic immune mechanisms underlying the cellular immunology and cellular biology of human infection with Mtb, to translation of these observations in TB endemic regions of the world.

Dr. Lewinsohn is also the director of the Center for Global Child Health Research, which is focused on collaborative research in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of childhood infection.