Summary
Ryan Ly is a senior research software engineer and technical leader who designs open, sustainable software tools and FAIR data standards to speed scientific discovery. As Technical Lead of the Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) ecosystem, he builds infrastructure that enables researchers worldwide to share and reuse complex neural and behavioral datasets. His work covers the full research-software lifecycle—from capturing user needs and architecting solutions to dissemination and community building. Based in San Francisco, he has been at Berkeley Lab since 2019, following doctoral work at Princeton and earlier research roles at Johns Hopkins University. With graduate training culminating in a Ph.D. from Princeton and an M.S.E. from Johns Hopkins, he uniquely blends rigorous academic research with practical software engineering and collaboration across multi-institutional teams. He is known for turning ambitious scientific objectives into scalable, auditable software that stands up to real-world use.
12 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
San José State University