STAAR Surgical Hires Align Exec Dr. Ben Park as CTO

STAAR Surgical has appointed Ben Park, Ph.D. as its new chief technology officer (CTO). Dr. Park will join the phakic IOL company’s executive committee and report to president and CEO Warren Foust.

Dr. Park joins the Lake Forest, California-based company from orthodontics leader Align Technology, where he’d served as Head of Emerging Technology since 2018. There, he built a global multidisciplinary team that spanned biomedical engineering, hardware, embedded systems, and software across the U.S. and APAC.

Before Align, Dr. Park was CTO of Fingertips Lab, where he led development and commercialization of a product for people with visual impairments across over 10 countries. Previously, he was chief technologist at Volcano Corporation, leading development of an intracardiac imaging platform, and co-founded Fluid Medical, where he developed an intravascular ultrasound platform using shape-memory alloy materials and forged development partnerships with Boston Scientific and Olympus.

Dr. Park holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, received the Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford School of Medicine, and has authored over 40 patents and peer-reviewed publications.

Foust was named STAAR’s permanent CEO last month and took office on August 4. He’d been interim co-CEO, president, and COO since February.  

Comments from STAAR

Foust: “Evolving STAAR from a single-product focus into a multi-product platform is central to our strategy — and requires the right leader. Ben Park is that leader. We have been delivering on revenue growth and profitability, and now it’s time to match that momentum with equal urgency on innovation. With our R&D and Advanced Research teams preparing for first-in-human studies of our next-generation products, the moment to accelerate is now. Ben’s track record of success in building and commercializing breakthrough medical device platforms makes him the ideal person to advance our innovation roadmap and unlock the full potential of our proprietary Collamer technology.”

Dr. Park: “STAAR has built something genuinely rare—a clinically proven product portfolio with over 30 years of real-world results, a proprietary material that no one else has, and a market opportunity that is only growing as myopia becomes one of the defining health challenges of our time. What drew me here is the ambition to go further: to take everything STAAR has learned and apply it across myopia and beyond. I see a real opportunity to build a multi-product platform by bringing a fresh perspective to how we identify and solve unmet clinical needs. This team is ready to execute, and I’m energized to help accelerate what we can deliver together—for surgeons, for patients, and for the future of refractive surgery.”