Team

Meet Ryu Lab

Dr. Keunwoo Ryu

Keunwoo Ryu, Ph.D.

Principal Investigator | Assistant Professor

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Keun received his PhD 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

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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.

Dr. Shengyan Gao

Yue Han

Research Technician II

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Yue received the MS 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. 
 

Yue Han

Meet the Ryu Lab team members and alumni

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Meet the PI

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Qing Zou, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor | Email

Dr. Qing Zou is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Division of Pediatric Cardiology, Department of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He also holds secondary appointments in the Department of Radiology, and Advanced Imaging Research Center (AIRC). He obtained his Ph.D. in the Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences (AMCS) program in the Graduate College of the University of Iowa.

Dr. Zou's research interests include:

  1. Unsupervised learning for cardiac MRI processing: Using deep generative models for solving inverse problems arising in MRI processing, especially cardiac MRI processing.
  2. Pulse sequences development for cardiopulmonary MRI: Development of sequences for cardiopulmonary MRI.
  3. Translational cardiology research using advanced Cardiac imaging: Development of new imaging biomarkers for congenital and acquired heart diseases.

Meet the Team

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Sukran Erdem, M.D.

Research Scientist | Email

Dr. Erdem was born and raised in Turkey. She studied medicine at Ege University Medical School and then completed a Cardiology-IM Program at Istanbul Science University,  Turkey. Prior to joining lab, she worked as an Advanced Cardiac Imaging Fellow at UTSW. She has 2 sons. She likes traveling and taking photos.

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Tonio Peng, M.S.

Graduate Student I Email

Tengya received his master degree in Medical Physics from Duke University in 2020 and master degree in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2024. Before joining the lab, he worked as a clinical therapy physicist. His research interests include automated treatment planning, free motion CBCT and MRI reconstruction, and various AI-related topics. He joined the lab in 2024 as a biomedical engineering graduate student.

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Corbin Maciel, B.S.

Graduate Student | Email

Corbin received his B.S. in Physics from Brigham Young University in 2022. Prior to joining the lab, he performed research projects assessing dose of cone beam computed tomography in image guided radiation therapy and studying the effects of metal implants near the spine in proton therapy. He joined the lab in 2023 as a graduate student in the biomedical engineering program. His current research focuses on the development of deep learning methods for cardiac MRI super-resolution and reconstruction to decrease acquisition time.

Lab Alumni

We thank for all of you who have contributed to the lab.

1. Anna Andrews
- Summer Intern (2023)
- Current Position: PhD student

2. Rithvik Gunda
- Research Assistant (2023-2024)
- Current Position: MD student

3. Samantha Stebbings
- Summer Intern (2024)
- Current Position: Undergraduate student at Purdue University

4. Alexandra Jack
- Summer Intern (2024)
- Current Position: Undergraduate student at University of Michigan

5. Nikash Kakarla
- Summer Intern (2024)
- Current Position: Undergraduate student at Texas A&M University

PI and team members of Zou Lab

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