Rong (Rose) Wang
Associate Professor, Department of Oral and Craniofacial Sciences.
Dr. Rose Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Oral and Craniofacial Sciences. Her research focuses on two major areas: 1. Applying cutting-edge bio-spectroscopy and imaging (e.g., FTIR), advanced microscopy techniques, digital pathology, spatial multiomics (e.g., proteomics and transcriptomics), and machine learning/deep learning to develop novel technologies for the early detection of oral cancer, and 2. Employing these techniques to comprehensively characterize dental biomaterials, as well as develop data-driven approaches for property prediction and novel biomaterial discovery.
Dr. Rose Wang received her PhD in the Health Sciences and Technology program from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School in 2005. Prior to her academic career, she spent 10 years in industry, serving as Project Manager, Vice President, and Chief Science Officer in two startup companies, where she developed and commercialized internationally patented coupling-antenna technology for health protection.
Since joining UMKC in 2018, Dr. Rose Wang published research and review articles in high-impact peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Dental Research, Dental Materials, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Diagnostics and Scientific Reports. She serves as Associate Editor in the Editorial Board of “Artificial Intelligence, Computational Biology, Deep Learning” for Technology in Cancer Research & Treatment, a Review Editor for Frontier in Oral Health and an ad hoc reviewer for Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy, Analyst, Clinical Oral Investigations, Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences, Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, and International Journal of Polymer Sciences.
Dr. Rose Wang is the Principal Investigator for an NIH R56 grant titled “Decoding FTIR-based multimodal imaging for risk assessment of precancerous oral lesions” (09/2024 – 08/2025), an NIH R21 grant titled “Infrared Spectroscopic Imaging and Machine Learning for Risk Stratification of Oral Epithelial Dysplasia” (01/2023 – 12/2024), and an UMKC Funding for Excellence grant titled “Decoding Bio-Spectroscopy with Artificial Intelligence for Early Oral Cancer Detection” (01/2023-12/2023). She is a co-inventor of two patents currently under application with the UMKC office of technology commercialization.
Dr. Rose Wang serves on the American Association of Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial Research (AADOCR) Committee on Diversity and Inclusion (2024-2027) and was a mentee fellow for the Class of 2022-2023 of the AADOCR MIND the Future program. She serves on the UMKC Research Advisory Council. She is currently teaching oral cancer lectures in the Applied Biochemistry course, and has supervised and mentored a postdoctoral fellow, Ph.D. students, DDS summer scholars, undergraduate student at the UMKC School of Dentistry.
Phone: 816-235-2176
wangrong@umkc.edu
