Rate My Professor Suva Roy

Suva Roy, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the University of Utah's Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine, based at the John A. Moran Eye Center. He concurrently serves as Adjunct Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neural Engineering. Dr. Roy obtained his PhD in Physics from Indiana University Bloomington, studying information processing in the fly visual system, and his MS through graduate training at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Before his current role, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Senior Research Associate at Duke University School of Medicine, developing custom light-sheet imaging systems for high-resolution neural activity recording in ex vivo retinae, and an Assistant Project Scientist at the Stein Eye Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, leading projects on cell-type-specific retina-to-brain pathways.

The Roy Laboratory focuses on the organization and function of retinal neural circuits in the context of natural vision and blinding diseases like glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. Using techniques such as large-scale multielectrode arrays, viral vectors, optogenetics, light-sheet fluorescence imaging, anatomical tracing, and computational modeling, the team investigates retinal cell types, computations, light adaptation and neuromodulation, projections to the brain, and structural/functional anomalies in disease. Current projects encompass the functional diversity of retinal ganglion cells in cone-dominated retinas, the role of dopamine in retinal adaptation and related diseases, comparative retinotectal projections across species through NIH-funded research, sensing of ocular stress in glaucoma models, and developmental refinement of retinal circuits during postnatal visual experience. Notable publications include "Inter-mosaic coordination of retinal receptive fields" (Nature, 2021), "High-resolution light-field microscopy with patterned illumination" (Biomedical Optics Express, 2021), "An optical approach for mapping functional connectivity at single-cell resolution in brain circuits" (Cell Reports Methods, 2022), "Large-scale interrogation of retinal cell functions by 1-photon light-sheet microscopy" (Cell Reports Methods, 2023), "GABAergic Inhibition Controls Receptive Field Size, Sensitivity, and Contrast Preference of Direction Selective Retinal Ganglion Cells Near the Threshold of Vision" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2024), and "Emerging strategies targeting genes and cells in glaucoma" (Vision Research, 2025). The lab's long-term goal is to pinpoint molecular and neural targets for gene and drug delivery to halt disease progression and restore vision.