World in a Cell

BACK

Gery Ryan

Senior Behavioral Scientist,
RAND Corporation

Portrait photo: Gery Ryan

Gery Ryan is assistant dean for academic affairs at the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Policy Analysis and a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. Trained as a medical anthropologist, Ryan has conducted research on decision making processes, ethnographies of healthcare, and the integration of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

Ryan's work and collaboration with others cuts across mental and physical health and he has done research on HIV/AIDS, depression, serious mental illness, childhood diarrhea and acute respiratory illnesses, obesity and complementary and alternative medicine to name a few areas.

Gery is an anthropologist by training, and a self-described ‘quantoid’ - looking at the scientific side of anthropology. He lives and breathes and think things through as within matrices that he’s able to analyse.

In society, we have a tendency to think of people as the fundamental social entity. it. I think there's something smaller than a human that is social...The key thing in societies are actually roles.

“Proteins and protein chains are basically memory mechanisms."

“Memory is the ability to remember and replicate what you already have. Memory mechanisms exist in the human body as protein chains and chromosomes, and in society we replicate through data and technology.”