Ryan Ly
Senior Research Software Engineer at Allen Institute
United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRyan Ly is a senior research software engineer and technical lead with 11+ years of experience building open, FAIR-compliant data standards and cloud-native infrastructure for neuroscience. As Technical Lead of the Neurodata Without Borders ecosystem, he has driven adoption across 150+ labs and integrated NWB with dozens of community tools while architecting PB-scale data systems and agentic AI tooling for reproducible analysis. He bridges deep domain expertise from a Princeton PhD in neuroscience to production-grade engineering—shipping no-code apps like NWB GUIDE and migrating 150+ TB to cloud-optimized Zarr at scale. A seasoned community builder, Ryan co-founded the Pre-COSYNE Brainhack and runs global trainings and hackathons to make complex neurodata more shareable and reusable. Notably, his work combines experimental neuroscience practice with software sustainability, enabling labs to move from bespoke pipelines to interoperable, long-lived data ecosystems.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Johns Hopkins UniversityPh.D., Neuroscience, Ph.D., Neuroscience at Princeton University
Github Skills (200)
json-schema10
semantic-web10
metadata10
specification10
schema10
inspect10
electrophysiology10
data-analytics10
api10
nwb10
data-science10
neuroscience10
open-data10
hierarchical10
data-modeling10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
hdmf-dev/hdmf-docutils
Apr 2019 - Feb 2025
Collection of CLIs, scripts and modules useful to generate HDMF/NWB schema documentation
Contributions:6 releases, 2 reviews, 40 PRs in 5 years 10 months
clisneurosciencepythonschema-documentationdocumentation-generator
linkml/linkml-arrays
May 2023 - Jan 2025
Support for loading and dumping N-dimensional arrays in LinkML.
Contributions:5 reviews, 10 PRs, 48 pushes in 1 year 8 months
arrayshdmflinked-datalinkmlmultidimensional-arrays
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