About Me

Dr. Ryan John Urbanowicz was born in New Milford, CT in 1982. Parents Maureen and Gary Urbanowicz raised him in the town of Sherman, CT. His father Gary, a former Air Force Top Gun pilot, passed away in 1995 after battling leukemia and lymphoma for 12 years. His mother Maureen is currently retired from her long time position as an elementary school teacher at the Sherman Elementary School. Ryan and his younger brother John became involved in the Boy Scouts of America as youths, each successfully earning the rank of Eagle Scout. Ryan is still an active adult leader, returning to Camp Russell in the Adirondacks (NY) each year to work with his hometown boy scout troop. In high school, Ryan pursued his growing interest in medical research by initiating a simple chemical carcinogenesis research project at the Danbury Hospital Diagnostic Cytogenetics Lab, and Boehringer Ingelheim R&D in Ridgefield CT. After graduating from New MilfordHigh School in 2000, he moved to Ithaca, NY where he began his degree in Biological Engineering (BEE) at Cornell University.At Cornell, Ryan concentrated in courses related to biomedical engineering, and upper level biology. Additionally, Ryan pursued courses in psychology, music, and design. In 2003, he obtained a summer internship exploring environmental engineering and lake management under Larry Marsicano at the Candlewood Lake Authority in Sherman, CT. In 2004, he was awarded a New Horizons summer research fellowship, and worked under Dr. Ruth N. Collins in the Molecular Medicine Department at Cornell studying yeast genetics and molecular biology techniques. Ryan graduated from Cornell in 2004 with a Bachelors of Biological Engineering and a Minor in Biomedical Engineering. He then began a Masters of Engineering at Cornell under the supervision of advisors Richard A. Durst (Ph.D.) and Antje J. Baeumner (Ph.D). Outside of his Engineering degree, Ryan dedicated his time at Cornell to environmental interests through the Ecology House program, and to public service, through Cayuga Heights Volunteer Fire and Rescue. He also volunteered at the local ER, and became certified as a EMT-B in 2002, and an EMT-I in 2004.

In the Fall of 2005, Ryan began his PhD in the Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) Program at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Afforded the opportunity by MCB, Ryan spent his first year rotating in the labs of Jason H. Moore (Ph.D.), Mark A. Israel (M.D), and Constance E. Brinckerhoff (Ph.D.) for three months each, working on genetic data simulation, human microRNA expression, and MMP-1 expression in response to growth factors, respectively. In the summer of 2006 Ryan joined the lab of Dr. Jason H. Moore in the genetics department, studying bioinformatics and the development of algorithms/tools for modeling, data mining, and classification applied to the realm of epidemiology and human genetics. For his thesis project, Ryan sought to address two phenomena which complicate the process of connecting genotypic factors with a disease endpoint. These phenomena include epistasis and genetic heterogeneity. To this end, Ryan adopted and studied Learning Classifier Systems (LCS). Ryan's work as a PhD candidate yielded 11 first author publications, two of which received best paper awards. While a graduate student, Ryan also played as a drummer in a graduate student band (The Scourge), and taught basic astronomy at the local children's museum of science (Montshire). Ryan successfully defended his thesis entitled "The Detection and Characterization of Epistasis and Heterogeneity: A Learning Classifier System Approach" in February of 2012.

Immediately following his defense, Ryan began his current position as a post-doctoral research fellow continuing in the lab of Dr. Jason H. Moore in order to further pursue the development of a bioinformatics-tuned learning classifier system, and expand his education to biostatistics. As a post-doc, Ryan volunteered at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center singing and playing guitar weekly.

In the fall of 2014, Dr. Moore announced his decision to move to the University of Pennsylvania, where Ryan joined his group as a research associate to continue the development and application of ExSTraCS, an advanced LCS machine learning algorithm, and join in the establishment and utilization of the new visualization and analysis laboratory at UPenn.

Travel Map

Key

Blue spots = places i've visited before the summer of 2000

Red spots = places i've vistied while at Cornell (2000-2005)

Green spots = places i've visited while at Dartmouth (2005-2012)

Maroon spots = places i've visited while employed at UPenn (2015-present)