Ryan is the Imaging Heuristics Lead for the Atacama Large (sub)-Millimeter Array (ALMA). Ryan graduated from the University of Virginia in 2013, spending two summers as an NRAO summer student. He then completed his PhD at Harvard and returned to NRAO in Charlottesville, VA in 2018 as a Jansky Fellow postdoc. Ryan joined the NRAO staff at the North American ALMA Science Center the following year, with his functional roles focused on heuristics research and development within the ALMA pipeline. More recently, he has also been involved with research for the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade and two ALMA development studies to improve interferometric imaging.
Ryan’s scientific research is broadly centered scientifically around star and planet formation and specifically focused on technique development to further astrochemical and interferometric analysis in a number of contexts, particularly in low SNR or noise-dominated regimes. These techniques have led to the discovery of over two dozen new molecules in space. He has also played an active role in developing the calibration and imaging pipelines for several ALMA large programs – check out some of the results at alma-maps.info.