Ryan Suk

Dr. Ryan Suk (pronunciation: Rye-un Sook) is a Health Economist and Decision Scientist by training and focuses on data-driven, community-engaged, and process-embedded research to evaluate and inform healthcare efficiency and individuals’ health decision making. Dr. Suk also serves as a Faculty Consultant for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) at the Winship Center for Cancer Health Equity Research of Winship Cancer Institute.  

Dr. Suk's research focuses on HPV-associated cancer prevention and control, as well as integrative and palliative oncology. She is especially interested in integrating economic evaluation, community engagement, and business process models to optimize resources and their allocation by developing and streamlining various decision support or navigation tools to enhance HPV-associated cancer prevention and control. Dr. Suk is also deeply committed to understanding public discourse to better "validate concerns without validating misinformation" surrounding cancer prevention and control with empathy and clarity.

Her ongoing supported projects include 1) identifying spatial and informational accessibility, and opportunity costs, for affordable HPV vaccination using advanced spatial modeling and cognitive task analysis; 2) developing a web tool for navigating healthcare and social resources (HPVx Navigator); and 3) integrating real-world data with causal machine learning and microsimulation to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects and conduct a distributional cost-effectiveness analysis of advanced palliative radiotherapy. Her research has been published in JAMA Health Forum, JAMA Network Open, JAMA Pediatrics, JNCI, LGBT Health, Journal of General Internal Medicine, and more. 

She is also passionate about mentoring and teaching, with a special focus on enhancing knowledge in health economics and decision science among students across diverse disciplines.

Dr. Suk received a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration (BBA) from Korea University (Seoul, Korea), an MS in Economics from the University of Utah (Salt Lake City, Utah), and after completing her PhD coursework at the University of Florida (Gainesville, Florida), a PhD in Health Economics from The University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHealth) School of Public Health (Houston, Texas). Before joining Emory, they served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy and at UTHealth School of Public Health.

Outside the academic sphere, they enjoy backyard birding & squirreling, as well as weight training. Dr. Suk is a Seoul (Korea) native.