David J. Caldwell, MD, PhD

I am currently a neurosurgery resident at UCSF. My clinical and research interests are at the intersection of functional neurosurgery, neurotrauma, and neurocritical care. I have been funded during residency through the NIH UE5 program, and mentored by Dr. Edward Chang and Dr. Geoff Manley in the Department of Neurological Surgery. My UE5 work is focused on intracranial electrophysiology in the setting of severe traumatic brain injury, particularly building new technologies to enable the analysis of time-synchronized ICU recordings, as well as techniques to expand our spatial sampling of cortical recordings. I have been fortunate to also work with Dr. Edilberto Amorim in the Department of Neurology on this project, as well as with Dr. Jon Kleen in the department of Neurology on the impact of re-referencing distance on intracranial electrophysiologic signal measurements. I also collaborate with Dr. Britta Lindquist (Department of Neurology) on the impact of acid-base derangements on clinical outcome. Other projects of mine include the study of electrocorticography and brain mapping as a surgical adjunct in the resection of cavernous malformations causing epilepsy.

I completed my completed my MD and PhD at the University of Washington through the MSTP program in 2021. I completed my PhD in the Department of Bioengineering in the laboratories of Dr. Jeffrey Ojemann (Neurosurgery) and Dr. Rajesh Rao (Computer Science and Engineering). My PhD research work focused on engineering direct electrical stimulation of human sensorimotor cortex. To do this, I worked with patients that are implanted with electrodes in their brains for clinical care of epilepsy and movement disorders such as Parkinson’s and Essential Tremor. Prior to this, I obtained my BSE and MSE in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan.