A native of Illinois, USA, David G. Hwang, MD, FACS obtained both his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), graduating first in his medical school class in 1984. After two years of internal medical residency and three years of ophthalmology residency at UCSF, he completed concurrent fellowships in cornea and refractive surgery as well as uveitis at the University of Southern California/Doheny Eye Institute as a Heed Fellow. In 1990 he joined the full-time faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, where he is currently Professor and Vice Chair and holds the Pearl T. Kimura and Samuel J. Kimura MD Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology. He serves as Director of the Cornea Service, Director of the Refractive Surgery Service, and Associate of the Francis I. Proctor Foundation for Research in Ophthalmology at UCSF.

Dr. Hwang has served in leadership and executive roles in a number of professional organizations, including President of the Ocular Microbiology and Immunology Group, Executive Secretary of the Max Fine Cornea Society, Medical Director of Ophthalmology at the UCSF Medical Center, and Medical Eye Bank Director of the UCSF Tissue Bank. He has chaired the joint American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO)-Centers for Disease Control Task Force for the Use of Vancomycin in Ophthalmology and has served on the writing committee for the Cornea and External Disease volume of the AAO Basic and Clinical Science series, in which he was responsible for authoring and editing the section on ocular infectious and external eye disease.

A committed educator, Dr. Hwang is active in the teaching of students, residents, and fellows and has received the Kimura Award for Excellence in Teaching from the UCSF Department of Ophthalmology. He has organized and taught numerous postgraduate courses and conferences at the regional, national, and international level and is a frequently invited speaker at national and international meetings. He has been the recipient of several named lectureships, been awarded the Honor Award and Senior Achievement Award from the American Academy of Ophthalmology, and been named to the “Best Doctors in the United States” list every year since 1996.

Dr. Hwang’s university-based referral practice is focused on corneal, cataract, and refractive surgery, with special interests in ocular infectious disease, corneal endothelial dystrophies and diseases, and high-risk corneal transplantation. He has conducted translational research into cellular transplantation and gene therapy approaches to corneal endothelial disease. He described the relationship between inadequate dosing of topical fluoroquinolones and subsequent antimicrobial resistance, and he reported the pharmacodynamic and genomic mechanisms underlying such development. As a result of his investigations, Dr. Hwang widely advocated for changing prevailing antimicrobial prescribing patterns away from prolonged, intermittent, and/or tapering dosing towards short-term, suprathreshold dosing.

His clinical interests include the development of innovative surgical techniques and instrumentation in corneal, cataract, and refractive surgery. He has published over 100 original articles and scientific abstracts and has co-authored two texts in cornea and refractive surgery. He resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, an ophthalmologist, and their three sons.