About Our Faculty

David D. Wang, M.D.

What makes a good teacher of Neurology? “I try to teach by not teaching,” says David Wang, “just as I try to examine a child by not examining.” He explains: “For me, it’s presenting cases to students and then demonstrating how to find the physical signs as you play with the child. I show students how to think through the situation and formulate the management plan. It’s like trying to solve a puzzle. Lectures aren’t efficient —students respond best to hands-on learning.”

The satisfaction for the teacher, he says, is that “ah-ha!” moment when the students “get it,” when they recognize the physical examination embedded in the playing and the reason behind the management. “I also try to convey Dr. Joynt’s advice: ‘If you have thirty minutes to spend with a patient, use twenty-nine of them to take the history, consider what you’ve learned as you gathered the raw data, and then make your differential diagnosis. Spend the last minute to find the signs that modify or confirm your diagnosis and hence the management.’”

Over the course of his thirty-year tenure, Dr. Wang has taught the intricacies of Child Neurology to scores of University of Rochester medical graduates, including many, if not most, of the area’s practicing pediatricians. His skills as a teacher are well-recognized: he is a three-time recipient of the Department of Pediatrics’ Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award, as well as the Senior Faculty Award given by the Department of Neurology.

All this is a long way from the rural village in Taiwan, where an inspired teacher (and science text author) introduced ten-year-old David Wang to the mysteries of the brain. He entered Taiwan University as a pre-med student, graduated in 1969 from its medical college, and left his homeland for Berkeley to pursue a PhD in neurophysiology. “Berkeley was one of the best places to be for me,” he recalls. “I was interested in studying the visual cortex, and I was fortunate to have as my professor and advisor Horace Barlow, Darwin’s great-grandson.”

When Dr. Barlow decided to return to Cambridge, Dr. Wang faced a crossroads: he could follow Barlow to England, as his mentor suggested, or he could move on to another university. A friend at Genesee Hospital recommended Rochester; the trip East was made, and the young physician interned here in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics.

“ I intended to become an adult neurologist,” Dr. Wang recalls, “but after my three months of residency at Strong Memorial with Dr. Horner [the Division’s first chief], he and Dr. Joynt convinced me to switch my emphasis to pediatric neurology.”
In 1977, newly graduated from his residency, Dr. Wang was assigned to Rochester General Hospital as an associate attending. At that time, RGH was a major teaching hospital for the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. The once-a-week half-day clinic soon expanded into four half-days. This continued until four years ago, when the clinic at RGH was closed.

Now, as Associate Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics, Dr. Wang has given up bench research (three years studying protein synthesis in rats) in favor of clinical research and has been University of Rochester’s principal investigator in several multi-center drug studies (Keppra, Topamax, Lamictal, and others).

Pointing to shelves of videotapes in his office, Dr. Wang explains his current research interest: videotaping patients. “Children with paroxysmal disorders often arrive for their neurology appointments in a stable state. We have to rely on the parents’ verbal description of the troubling incidents. I began asking parents to use a camcorder to record these incidents as they happened, and to come in when they had five or six on tape. Now, of course, they can use their digital cameras and cell phones to video stream fifteen seconds of action. This is information that is invaluable in helping make a diagnosis".

Dr. Wang has a joint appointment in Strong’s Epilepsy Center, and there too he is conducting research on the value of long-term (24/7) video EEG monitoring for inpatients. “Using advanced video technology, we can correlate events with EEG findings,” he points out.

Videotaping, in fact has become an important teaching tool for Dr. Wang. It’s one he’s sharing with colleagues in China, through demonstrations and seminars at four medical schools and six hospitals. “My dream is that sometime in the future we can take advantage of a secure site on the Internet to exchange information between physicians. Imagine a doctor seeking a consultation who e-mails this message: ‘I have a patient who . . . and here’s the video of what I’m seeing.” Dr. Wang projects a day when that image may be forwarded in real time, as will the consulting physician’s response.

In looking back over the years, Dr. Wang says he was “blessed to be a mixture.” “I’m a product of both a village and an urban environment. I was educated in China and the United States, in both research institutes and clinical facilities. I’ve had exposure to sage old-guard neurologists, such as Drs. Joynt, Horner, Satran, Marsh, Goldblatt, Griggs, and Moxley, and Drs. Hollander and Honch (as one of the ‘three musketeers’ there), and the stimulation of ‘young Turk’ neurologists working at Genesee Hospital, Rochester General Hospital and Strong Memorial Hospital. I’m a teacher and a researcher; I’m a pediatric neurologist and an epileptologist. I feel lucky that I have been a thread that bridged many things. My hope is that I can remain a

thread in the fabric of medical progression, connecting the past to the new and introducing the future to the present.”

“ It was been a pleasure to get to know David and to work with him,” says Division chief Jonathan Mink. “He is an excellent neurologist and an outstanding teacher. The residents and students often comment to me about the strength of his teaching. His participation in both Child Neurology and the Strong Epilepsy Center has been an important link between the two services.”

URMC Clinical Bio