Rate My Professor Suva Roy

Suva Roy, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the John A. Moran Eye Center, University of Utah. He earned an MS from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and a PhD in Physics from Indiana University Bloomington. Prior to his appointment at the University of Utah, Dr. Roy held positions as Senior Research Associate at Duke University School of Medicine and Assistant Project Scientist at the Stein Eye Institute, University of California, Los Angeles. He also serves as Adjunct Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Neural Engineering at the University of Utah.

The Roy Laboratory focuses on the neural circuit basis of vision and visual disorders, particularly how retinal cell types contribute to visual processing and degenerate in diseases like glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. Employing an interdisciplinary approach with techniques such as multielectrode array recordings, viral vectors, optogenetics, light-sheet fluorescence imaging, anatomical tracing, and computational modeling, the lab studies retinal ganglion cell diversity, dopamine-mediated light adaptation, retinotectal projections, and signaling disruptions in glaucoma models. Dr. Roy, trained in physics and neuroscience, has developed novel imaging systems and experimental platforms for high-resolution, high-throughput analysis of neural activity in ex vivo retina. He leads an NIH-funded comparative study to establish new animal models for retinal research aimed at identifying cellular and molecular targets for vision restorative therapies. Key publications include "Inter-mosaic coordination of retinal receptive fields" (Nature, 2021), "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), "Large-scale interrogation of retinal cell functions by 1-photon light-sheet microscopy" (Cell Reports Methods, 2023), "An optical approach for mapping functional connectivity at single-cell resolution in brain circuits" (Cell Reports Methods, 2022), "Emerging strategies targeting genes and cells in glaucoma" (Vision Research, 2025), and "Dopaminergic modulation of retinal processing from starlight to sunlight" (Journal of Pharmacological Sciences, 2019).