David Nguyen PhD MD is a physician-scientist in Infectious Diseases and studies applications of genome editing in the immune system as applied to understanding and correcting mutations causing primary immunodeficiency (PID). He completed his PhD in Materials Science and Medical Engineering at MIT in the HST program, where he studied nanoparticle delivery of DNA and RNA to the immune system in the laboratory of Prof. Robert Langer with applications in DNA vaccines and immunostimulatory RNA vaccine adjuvants. He then went to Stanford University for medical school, and since 2012 has been at the UCSF Medical Center where he completed medical residency and a clinical fellowship in Infectious Diseases, and a postdoc fellowship in Alex Marson's laboratory developing technologies for CRISPR gene editing in immune cells.

David is currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, Department of Medicine & Division of Infectious Diseases. His laboratory is based at the University of California, Berkeley Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI). The Nguyen lab focuses on three unmet needs for helping patients with primary immunodeficiency (PID) diseases: (i) genome engineering in primary human cells to identify and diagnose patient-specific PID mutations, (ii) functional CRISPR screens to understand and predict how PID mutations impact immune cell behavior, and (iii) developing novel gene editing technologies for correcting pathogenic mutations in the immune and blood (hematopoietic lineage) system – including PIDs and hemoglobinopathies. David is also an attending physician at UCSF with the adult infectious diseases service and immunology clinic, where he specializes in preventing and treating infections in patients with complex genetic immune defects.