Kevin Dean was raised in a small town in Northern California, received his B.A. in Chemistry at WIllamette University in Oregon, and was recognized twice as an ESPN Regional Academic All-American Running Back in Football. He then received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Colorado under the guidance of Dr. Amy Palmer and Dr. Ralph Jimenez. Here, his work focused on spectroscopy, protein engineering, and multi-parameter high-throughput microfluidic analyses and cell sorting.  Following graduation, he established the first campus-wide light microscopy facility at the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado.  Thereafter, he moved to UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas to perform his postdoctoral research under the guidance of Dr. Gaudenz Danuser and Dr. Reto Fiolka, where he was named a Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow, received the Dean’s Discretionary Award at UT Southwestern, and was the runner-up for the UT Southwestern Brown-Goldstein Excellence in Postdoctoral Research award.  Today, he runs a collaborative lab at UT Southwestern that develops technologies that enable the identification and molecular interrogation of exceedingly rare biological events, including metastatic colonization.