Assistant Professor, UT Southwestern Medical Center
Principal Investigator, Dean Lab
We build open-source, adaptive light-sheet microscopes and image-analysis workflows to reveal rare metastatic colonization events in intact tissues.
My lab works at the interface of optical engineering, microscope control software, molecular multiplexing, computer vision, and cancer biology. We are especially interested in technologies that make rare biological events measurable: metastatic colonization, tissue-scale spatial organization, dynamic signaling, and phenotype transitions that are difficult to capture with conventional imaging.
We develop imaging systems that can survey large tissues, identify biologically relevant regions or events, and adapt acquisition parameters in response to image content.
We develop and maintain software for light-sheet microscope control, smart acquisition, hardware abstraction, and reproducible imaging workflows.
We build and disseminate light-sheet microscopy platforms intended to make high-performance volumetric imaging more accessible to biology labs.
We develop analysis workflows for large, multi-channel, time-resolved, and spatially multiplexed imaging datasets.
We apply these technologies to understand how cancer cells survive, migrate, colonize distant tissues, and interact with local microenvironments.
| Project | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
| Dean Lab | Autonomous microscopy, molecular multiplexing, and computational imaging for rare cancer biology. | Website |
| navigate | Open-source Python software for light-sheet microscope control, adaptive acquisition, and reusable imaging workflows. | Docs · GitHub |
| Altair | Open-source light-sheet microscope hardware designed for accessible, high-performance volumetric imaging. | Docs · GitHub |
| Dean Lab documentation | Documentation hub for lab software, hardware, teaching material, and publication-associated repositories. | Docs |
- Autonomous microscopy
- Adaptive light-sheet imaging
- Open-source microscope control
- Computational microscopy
- Molecular multiplexing
- Tissue clearing and expansion microscopy
- Spatial biology and content-rich histopathology
- Metastatic colonization and rare cancer-cell phenotypes
- Lab website: dean-lab.org
- Lab documentation: thedeanlab.github.io
- GitHub organization: TheDeanLab
- Google Scholar: Kevin Dean
- UT Southwestern profile: Kevin Dean
- LinkedIn: Kevin M. Dean
- Bluesky: @kevin-dean.bsky.social
For research, collaboration, software, or training inquiries, please contact me through my UT Southwestern profile or the Dean Lab website.