Professor Ryan's research focuses on emerging urban design paradigms, with a particular focus on postindustrial cities and neighborhoods. His book Design After Decline: How America rebuilds shrinking cities, was published in 2012 by the University of Pennsylvania Press and was selected by Planetizen as a Top Ten Book of 2012. Ryan has worked as a city planner and urban designer in New York City, Boston, and Chicago. From 2007 to 2009, he was Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and from 2002 to 2007 he was Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and co-director of their City Design Center. Ryan has published in edited volumes including The City After Abandonment (2012) and the Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning (2012) as well as in the Journal of Urban Design, Journal of the American Planning Association, Urban Morphology, Journal of Planning History, and Urban Design International. Ryan received his B.S. degree in Biology from Yale in 1991, his M. Arch. from Columbia in 1994 and his Ph.D. in Urban Design and Planning from MIT in 2002.