Kevin Dean

UT Southwestern Medical Center

Kevin Dean is an interdisciplinary scientist who develops and applies advanced technologies to understand how tissue function arises from the organization and activity of proteins at subcellular scales. He earned his B.A. in chemistry from Willamette University in 2007 and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2013 under the mentorship of Amy Palmer. His expertise spans a range of fields, including thermodynamics, optical probes, nonlinear spectroscopy, microfluidics, advanced microscopy, cell biology, and computer vision.

Dean leads key efforts in two multisite Center Grants: the NCI Cellular Cancer Biology Imaging Research Center, where he is developing an autonomous multiscale microscope to identify and isolate single metastatic cells in cleared tissues, and the NIGMS Biomedical Technology Development and Dissemination Center, where he advances and disseminates cutting-edge light-sheet microscopy techniques. His contributions to microscopy — such as axially swept light-sheet, field synthesis, and oblique plane microscopy — enable live-cell imaging and reveal new insights into cellular signal transduction through multiplexed biosensors and sophisticated time-series analysis.