Lesley S. ​Park, PhD, MPH

Biography

Dr. Lesley Park is Assistant Research Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. She holds an MPH and PhD in Chronic Disease Epidemiology from the Yale School of Public Health.

Dr. Park serves as Executive Director of the Veterans Aging Cohort Study (VACS) consortium, an international collaboration of methodologists, clinicians, and trainees utilizing data from the US Veterans Health Administration. VACS has been at the forefront of research to understand aging with HIV, particularly with respect to alcohol and substance use, physiologic frailty, and polypharmacy. Within VACS, Dr. Park is PI of the VACS-HIV cohort and co-director of the VACS Cancer Core, overseeing the consortium’s cancer research portfolio. Her research has examined cancer incidence trends among persons with long-term chronic infection (such as HIV and hepatitis C virus), epidemiologic methods for cancer research, and cancer prevention.

Dr. Park chairs the Scientific Secretariat for the International Workshop on HIV and Hepatitis Observational Databases (IWHOD), an established forum for the application of real-world data to emerging issues in infectious disease. She leads an international scientific committee of world-renowned epidemiologists and clinicians and coordinates the workshop’s administrative and scientific activities.

Throughout her career, Dr. Park has championed education and training initiatives. She co-founded the Stanford AHEaD summer research program for college students from underrepresented and historically excluded groups in health sciences. At Stanford’s Center for Population Health Sciences, she oversaw educational programming and helped establish the PHS Data Center and Postdoctoral Fellowship program. She teaches computing, data management, and epidemiologic analysis methods, and is dedicated to mentoring scholars at all stages of their professional development.

Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Dr. Park was Senior Research Scientist at Stanford. Earlier in her career, she conducted research at Yale School of Medicine and the Center for Biostatistics in AIDS Research (CBAR) at Harvard School of Public Health.

Research Interests

• HIV
• Cancer
• Observational research methods and real-world data applications
• Data management and curation

Education

• Postdoctoral Fellowship – Epidemiology
  Stanford University School of Medicine
• PhD – Chronic Disease Epidemiology
  Yale School of Public Health
• MPH – Chronic Disease Epidemiology
  Yale School of Public Health
• BA – Mathematics, French Language & Literature
  University of Virginia

Publications

• Google Scholar
• PubMed

Courses Taught

• • Fall 2026 | PBHLTH 250W
  • Epidemiologic Methods I
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• • Fall 2026 | PBHLTH 292
  • Epi/Bio MPH Second Year Capstone Writing Seminar
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