Bio
Dr. Kwon joined the Stanford Pain Medicine faculty in 2021. He is board-certified in Anesthesiology, Pain Medicine, and board-eligible in General Pediatrics. His clinical focus is in chronic pain care transition from adolescence to adulthood and chronic pain syndromes of young adults (below age 30). Collaborating with a multidisciplinary team and leveraging digital health solutions, he is building the Stanford Adolescent and Young Adult Pain Program to bridge the Pediatric Pain Management Program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford and the Stanford Pain Management Center at Stanford Hospital and Clinics.
Dr. Kwon completed his B.S. degree in Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. As an undergraduate student, he pursued bone tissue engineering and stem cell research within the MIT Langer Lab and drug delivery research within the Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery at Boston Children's Hospital. He then received his medical degree at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. As a medical student, he did research in neuroengineering and optogenetics in the MIT Media Lab. He completed a combined residency in Pediatrics and Anesthesiology at Boston Children's Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital and a fellowship in Pain Medicine at Stanford Hospital.
With his diverse research background in various engineering fields, he continues to collaborate with colleagues across academia and industry in medical device and technology development. During the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic and when a critical shortage of ICU ventilators was looming in the United States, he co-led the clinical team for the MIT Emergency Ventilator project (https://emergency-vent.mit.edu/), which published an open-source reference design for converting any manual resuscitator bag into a basic ventilator. This open-source reference design has given rise to multiple spin-off ventilator designs across the globe and continues to save countless patient lives in countries where limited critical care resources are available. Dr. Kwon is interested in building more resilient critical care healthcare systems leveraging technology that is actually designed to meet the infrastructural challenges in developing countries.
