Ryan received his Ph.D. in the Study of Religion from Harvard University in 2010 and his A.B. in Classics & Sanskrit and Religious Studies from Brown University in 2001. He has served as a web assistant and web developer for the Pluralism Project since 2006, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2010–2011. Ryan has transitioned the Project through several generations of technology, from hand-crafted PHP and HTML pages, to CakePHP, to WordPress, and most recently to OpenScholar. Ryan currently serves as the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Assistant Professor in Buddhist Studies at Skidmore College.