Bio
David K. Park is Dean of Strategic Initiatives and serves as a senior advisor to the Executive Vice President and Dean of Faculty of the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. Dr. Park is a member of Columbia University’s Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering New Media Center, Director of Special Projects at the Applied Statistics Center and Fellow at the Center for the Management of Systemic Risk at Columbia University. Dr. Park is also a founding member of Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Lab. Dr. Park has co-founded several New York-based technology companies.
Dr. Park is currently exploring the historical arc of universities, limitations and possibilities of “big data”, how failure and vulnerability are the foundations of innovation and creativity across organizations, as well as the electoral origins of congressional polarization. Dr. Park is also working on several manuscripts including, The Twentieth Century Sectional Reversal: How did the Republican States Switch to the Democrats and Vice Versa? and Is History Repeating Itself? Comparing 1875 to 1928 and 1971 to 2008.
Dr. Park received his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland and his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia where he focused on historical-comparative institutional analyses of societal change. He was an assistant professor of political science and applied statistics at Washington University, assistant professor at George Washington University, visiting professor at Columbia University and Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He has written numerous articles and co-authored Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State: Why American Vote the Way They Do (Princeton University Press).