biography

I am Rob Ryan, a Stanford interaction designer (UX/UI) with a focus in visual design and user experience. I am most comfortable in a start-up environment: working in small teams at technology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. I complement my design chops with strong negotiation and engineering skills, because building is just as much fun as dreaming.

education

I will graduate from Stanford University in June of 2011 with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems. If you are interested in what I studied as an undergraduate at Stanford (mostly Computer Science, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Psychology, and Philosophy), I have made my unofficial transcript (to date) available for download here.

Outside of class, I pursue(d) a number of leadership roles on campus. For four years, I helped manage the Student Calling Center; each night, we raised around $25,000 from Stanford alumni and friends. (At $300,000 per year, I hold Stanford's fundraising record). I published research (and later managed students) as part of the Ramscar Lab on Learning, Cognition, and Language. I am part of the nationally acclaimed Stanford Spoken Word Collective, and perform spoken word poetry each quarter for an audience of ~250. I founded the Stanford Design Initiative, a seventeen-person student group that collects campus designers to offer workshops, enter competitions, and share skills with our growing community.

experience

I'm in my fourth year of undergraduate studies in Silicon Valley. Like many of my friends, I've been helping out with start-up ventures for the past two years. I've been part of young teams that attack problems in mobile media (Spyglass [now defunct]), social questions (Unmelt), and mobile food-ordering (GrubGrab). The last two of these received seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, a respected venture capital firm on Sand Hill Road.

I'm proud of the pixels I made for these teams, but I also try to get away from the computer too. I'm an Eagle Scout, so if I'm not on gChat, I'm probably on the trail. I've traveled all over the Spanish-speaking world, and I blog as I go. I am still a little young, and a little foolish. I am okay with that. :-)