Ryan Ly
Senior Research Software Engineer at Berkeley Lab
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)
python10
json-schema10
semantic-web10
metadata10
firefox-addon10
linkml10
shex10
shacl10
owl10
schema10
metamodel10
deconvolution10
umbrella10
electrophysiology10
matlab10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
hdmf-dev/hdmf-common-schema
Jan 2020 - Jan 2022
Specifications for pre-defined data structures provided by HDMF.
Contributions:12 releases, 40 reviews, 44 commits in 2 years
data-structuredata-structures
rly/ndx-optogenetics
Jan 2024 - Feb 2026
NWB extension for optogenetics metadata
Contributions:2 releases, 11 reviews, 3 PRs in 2 years
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.