Elon’s Faculty Research and Development Committee selected Ryu’s proposal for a full-year, full-pay sabbatical in 2025-26 to complete a mathematical model predicting the dynamics of key immune cells in cancer biology.
Associate Professor of Mathematics Hwayeon Ryu was awarded a full-year, full-pay sabbatical through Elon to investigate the cause of a medical anomaly with the potential to advance cancer treatment strategies.
Ryu will spend the 2025-26 academic year creating a mathematical model of the dynamics related to the differentiation and activation of macrophages, key immune cells, through mathematical modeling. Macrophages often act to suppress tumor growth but, at other times, can behave to support tumor growth and progression. Mysteriously, they can also switch roles, baffling physicians and endangering patient health.
Ryu will collaborate with internationally renowned mathematical biologists, including Susanna Röblitz at the University of Bergen in Norway, to model cell populations and responses to their environment.
“Switching between two distinct phenotypes, between tumor-suppressive and tumor-promoting macrophages: Where is that switch coming from? We know it happens, but we don’t know what drives it or how to control it well,” Ryu said. “These changes affect treatment. Our job is to fill gaps in the knowledge of how and why macrophages behave this way and ultimately help doctors better understand where these changes come from.”
Elon’s Faculty Research and Development Committee selected Ryu for the competitive sabbatical based on the “potential to advance research in the field of oncology, her demonstrated record of success and continuous productivity, the exceptionally well-structured proposal that provided concrete research goals, a well-defined timeline, detailed expected outcomes, and objective measures for the assessment of success,” said Ifeoma Udeh, chair of the Faculty Research and Development Committee and associate professor of accounting in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business.
Faculty are encouraged to apply for sabbaticals if they are conducting extensive research or engaged in significant additional study that will result in their professional development. At Elon, faculty may apply for a full-year/full-pay sabbatical, a leave of one–half of a full year’s teaching load at full salary, or for a leave of a full academic year at half salary.
Ryu’s previous research with her macrophage collaboration group modeled the behavior of macrophages on a single-cell level, supported by the American Institute of Mathematics SQuaRE collaboration grant. The proposed research will expand to cell populations in the presence of tumors where external environments and time delays play crucial roles in macrophage dynamics. Ryu plans to continue refining their model beyond the 2025-26 academic year while publishing and presenting the research at a national or international conference.
Since joining Elon in 2019, Ryu has won three external grants, including a 3-year, $300,000 National Science Foundation grant to mathematically model the human immune responses to COVID-19. In that project, she has led three interdisciplinary teams of undergraduates in creating, refining and expanding that model, two of which presented at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. Last summer, her research team was recognized for excellence with the Janet L. Andersen Award for Undergraduate Research in Mathematical or Computational Biology at the 2024 Mathematical Association of America MathFest conference. Ryu also received the Mathematical Association of America Southeast Section’s 2024 Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning College Mathematics Faculty Member, and this summer was named a Mary Beth Ruskai Fellow by the Sylvia Bozeman and Rhonda Hughes EDGE Foundation.
Since 2020-21, she has also served as a co-organizer of the Integrating Research in Science (IRIS) conference, a student-led regional STEM undergraduate conference, with faculty at Wake Forest University. The IRIS conference was held at Elon for the first time in spring 2023, and will return to campus on April 12, 2025.
“I am so honored for the sabbatical award and excited to continue collaborating on this important, highly impactful macrophage project,” Ryu said. “We hope that our work may provide a feasible method for testing hypotheses proposed by oncologists, potentially suggesting new experiments based on the predictions of our theoretical models. Moreover, I strongly believe my sabbatical work will help me further grow as a teacher-scholar-mentor at Elon as I develop new content or enhance my teaching practices by integrating scholarship on macrophages and mathematics into my teaching.”