Dr. David Young is Professor of Plastic Surgery at UCSF. His area of expertise includes wound healing, microsurgery, and reconstruction after burns and trauma. His research interests include the molecular mechanisms of wound healing and the epidemiology and treatment of soft tissue infections.
Dr. Young is a graduate of Columbia College and earned a medical degree at the Yale University School of Medicine. He trained in pathology at Cornell Medical College and general surgery at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital. He then completed an NIH-NRSA funded research Fellowship at Yale and a Plastic Surgery Fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Young is primarily interested in the mechanisms and treatments of normal and abnormal wound healing. He is Principal Investigator on a study pertaining to the role of heat shock proteins, homeobox genes, and hypoxia in cutaneous wound healing.
The effects of manipulating of hypoxia inducible proteins, homeobox genes, and heat shock proteins in wound repair are presently under investigation. In vitro and in vivo models of wound repair are used to study the effects of induction and blockage of these proteins on normal and abnormal healing. Expression of many of these proteins is altered in conditions of poor wound healing as found in patients with diabetes.
Dr. Young hopes to understand how these proteins interact during wound healing and to develop novel methods to improve healing. Dr. Young's research is conducted in the UCSF Surgical Research Laboratory at SFGH. The research is currently funded by a RO-1 grant "Diabetes, Hypoxia Inducible Factor-1, and Delayed Wound Healing" from the NIH-NIGMS.