Ryan Gutenkunst (CV) is Professor and Department Head of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University, where he worked with Jim Sethna on unveiling universal “sloppy” parameter sensitivities in systems biology models and on what they imply for evolution. He then did a postdoc at Cornell with Scott Williamson and Carlos Bustamante, where he developed dadi, a widely used method for inferring population histories from genomic data. His second postdoc was with Byron Goldstein at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he modeled immune signaling in mast cells. He joined the MCB faculty in 2010 and has led it since 2023.
Ryan's research group develops and applies computational and statistical methods for inferring demographic history and natural selection, particularly distributions of fitness effects, from genomic data, in systems ranging from humans to polyploid plants to tumors. Ryan also contributes to community resources including the stdpopsim simulation catalog, and he organizes the Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament (GHIST). He also directs the NIH T32 PhD training program in Computational and Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems.
Outside of work, Ryan’s interests include his family, triathlon, and alpine skiing.
