About Ryan

I always struggle to identify my "hometown", since my family moved around a lot when I was young. We lived in Utah, New Mexico, Texas, and eventually moved to Florida, where I attended high school. I developed interests in many different areas, including science, music, and particularly television production and video editing. I co-produced the school news during my senior year at Lakewood Ranch High School.

After high school, I served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, where I was assigned to the beautiful islands of Fiji. I consider the two years of my service there as some of the most influential in my life.

Upon returning from my mission to Fiji, I enrolled at the University of Central Florida, initially aiming to enter the Film program. Over the summer, a friend introduced me to Alyson, who had returned home from her first year at Brigham Young University. As our relationship evolved from friendship to romance, I started to think hard about what impacts my career aspirations might have on raising a family, and ultimately decided to switch my aims from Film to Computer Engineering.

The engineering program absolutely fascinated me! I fell in love with the mixed focus on Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and discovered a knack for writing code. Alyson and I were married during my Sophomore year. In 2012 I was accepted into the MITRE co-op program and was later hired on part time while still engaged in my undergraduate courses. After graduating with a BS in Computer Engineering (and a minor in Psychology), I was hired on full-time at The MITRE Corporation.

During my undergraduate program, I had the privilege of taking a fascinating Biomedical Nanotechnology course, and found myself instantly drawn to the junction between computers, biology, and health. I applied to the Master's program in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia, and Alyson and I relocated to Charlottesville. My son was born just before my first semester began in the Fall of 2015. My daughter was born two years later in 2017, while I was still working through my Master's program.

After receiving my Master's degree, my wife and I had a desire to move out west to get cozy with the mountains. We relocated to the Colorado Springs, Colorado area in 2019, where we lived for only a short time before COVID-19 spread across the globe. I began working on the first novel of the Source's Edge series, a narrative which has been evolving in my mind since I was in my early teenage years.

In the fall of 2020, I took a fully remote job with Marqeta, a company out of the California Bay Area doing groundbreaking work in the financial technology industry. I'm currently an Engineering Manager on the Data & Insights team, where I manage a group of engineers and lead engineering work on Marqeta's reporting infrastructure.

In 2021, we decided to move back out east to Raleigh, North Carolina to be closer to family. Soon thereafter, I started the process of preparing my first novel, The Secrets of Tercast, for publication, and it was released in the fall of 2022!

One year later the fall of 2023, we welcomed our third child to the world while I was editing an early draft of book two. We love our little girl!