John B. Sunwoo, MD

Dr. Sunwoo was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and his medical degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He completed his training in Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at Washington University. Dr. Sunwoo has been at Stanford University since 2008, and his clinical focus is on the surgical management of head and neck cancer, specifically focusing on melanoma and neoplasms of the thyroid and parathyroid glands. He is a member of the Pigmented Lesions and Melanoma Clinic and the Melanoma Working Group at Stanford. He is also the co-founder of the Stanford Thyroid and Parathyroid Tumor Board.

In addition to his clinical work, Dr. Sunwoo is the Director of Head and Neck Cancer Research at Stanford University and the principal investigator of an NIH-funded laboratory in the Stanford Cancer Institute. His research is focused on three primary areas: (1) the immune response to cancer, particularly a tumorigenic population of cells within malignancies called cancer stem cells; (2) the biology and developmental programs of a special lymphocyte population involved in innate immunity called natural killer (NK) cells; and (3) intra-tumor and inter-tumor heterogeneity in head and neck cancer.