Meet the Founder

Dr. Ryan is a published linguist, doctoral mentor, and research consultant whose career spans fifteen years in higher education and research consulting. A Baltimore native, he received his academic formation at research universities in the United States and Europe.

He began his studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he majored in applied linguistics and French. Alongside his studies, he coordinated tutoring and disability-support services, participated in a corpus-linguistics research project, and completed an honors thesis that was subsequently published.

Dr. Ryan then received one of four competitive departmental scholarships to pursue an MSc in Language Sciences at University College London, specializing in linguistics and neuroscience. His master’s thesis, examining the French pronominal and clitic system, was subsequently published. After teaching academic writing, English as a second language, and linguistics, he continued to the University of Amsterdam as an external PhD candidate. During this period, he also began mentoring doctoral candidates and developing the framework that would become the Institute for Doctoral Formation and the Dissertation Collegium.

His doctoral thesis, On the Epiphenomenon of Grammaticalisation: A Mapping Hypothesis Approach, examines language change through comparative work in Hungarian and the Kwa languages of West Africa. It proposes a framework for understanding how learners map sound to meaning during language acquisition and how those mappings may contribute to the formation of new grammatical systems.

Dr. Ryan’s methodological training spans both quantitative and qualitative research. His graduate work included neuroimaging methods and statistics, while his subsequent research and mentoring expanded into qualitative design and analysis. His approach emphasizes the logic of research-design selection, alignment among the elements of a study, and coherence among the problem, purpose, research questions, methods, evidence, and claims.

The Dissertation Collegium grew from this combined experience as a scholar and mentor. Through his work with doctoral candidates, Dr. Ryan saw the need for sustained guidance, intellectual community, and clearer instruction in the reasoning underlying doctoral research. He established the Collegium to restore these formative conditions within the realities of contemporary doctoral study.

Outside his academic work, Dr. Ryan is an active steward of Baltimore’s Polish cultural community. He serves as Financial Secretary of Polish National Alliance Council 21 and as a board member of the National Katyń Memorial Foundation. His commitment to cultural stewardship also informs his work in doctoral education: both are concerned with preserving intellectual traditions by sustaining the communities in which those traditions remain alive.

In his spare time, Dr. Ryan is a classical-music enthusiast and cellist. He also enjoys cooking — particularly Polish, Georgian, Indian, and Thai cuisine — and mixology