Un J. Kang

Un J. Kang, MD is the Founders Professor of Neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology. He serves as Director of Translational Research at the Marlene and Paolo Fresco Institute for Parkinson's and Movement Disorders and Co-Director of the Parekh Center for Interdisciplinary Neurology. His clinical practice focuses on Parkinson's disease and related movement disorders including tremor, dystonia, and Huntington's disease.

Dr. Kang earned his MD from Johns Hopkins University in 1982, completed residency in Neurology at NY Presbyterian - Columbia University Medical Center in 1986, and specialized in Movement Disorders through fellowship training at the same institution in 1987.

His research investigates the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease and mechanisms of therapy, with particular focus on basal ganglia circuit plasticity, neural adaptation to dopamine loss, and development of biomarkers for neurodegenerative disorders. He pioneered experimental gene therapy approaches for Parkinson's disease and now directs the Kang Lab where his team studies how brain circuitry is perturbed by dopamine loss and pharmacological treatment in mouse models.

Dr. Kang's research portfolio includes multiple NIH-funded projects examining striatal cholinergic interneuron dysfunction, freezing of gait mechanisms, and biomarker development for Parkinson's disease. His laboratory has published extensively on Parkinson's disease mechanisms with 178 publications to date, including significant recent work on alpha-synuclein detection methods and striatal pathway alterations in Parkinsonian motor deficits.

Before joining NYU Langone in 2019, Dr. Kang created and led a multidisciplinary research team at the University of Chicago for two decades and previously served as chief of the movement disorders division at Columbia University. He leads the BioFIND consortium as principal investigator, banking biospecimens for Parkinson's disease biomarker discovery.