Dr. Joseph Ryan completed a B.S. in computer science at the University of Maryland University College while working as a bioinformatics programmer at the National Human Genome Research Institute. He earned a Ph.D. in bioinformatics from Boston University. He was a postdoctoral fellow and research fellow in the Computational Genomics Unit at the National Human Genome Research Institute. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology in Bergen, Norway.