Team
Keunwoo Ryu, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator | Assistant Professor
Keun received his Ph.D. at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in the Lee Kraus Lab, where he studied how NAD⁺ metabolism regulates transcription during cell differentiation. He then completed postdoctoral training with Craig Thompson at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he discovered that cells generate distinct mitochondrial subpopulations through higher-order enzyme assembly and mitochondrial fusion and fission dynamics to support metabolically competing reactions.
Lab Members
Shengyan Gao, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Dr. Gao received Ph.D. in microbiology from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. She has been working as a postdoctoral researcher and research associate in the department of cell biology at UT Southwestern since 2019. Her major research interest used to be RNA metabolism and processing regulation and elucidation of interaction mechanism between RNA viruses and host.
Annie Zhou
Ph.D. Student
Annie received her B.S. in Biological Chemistry from UCLA in 2020. She is a biochemistry graduate student who came to UTSW in 2023 and joined the Ryu Lab in 2026, where she will be investigating the properties of metabolic enzyme filamentation in vitro to learn more about the mechanism of this unusual mode of regulation. Her most longstanding interest is in the logic of why the cell "chooses" certain types of regulatory mechanisms for certain processes.
Yue Han
Research Technician II
Yue received the M.S. degree in Plant Biology from The Pennsylvania State University in 2025. Her previous work focused on early cellular responses and signaling dynamics, which sparked a broader interest in how cells regulate cellular pathways across space and time. She joined Ryu Lab as a research technician with a continued interest in cell biology.
Meet the Ryu Lab team members and alumni
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