Ryan Straight

Dr. Ryan Straight is an Honors and Assistant Professor of Cyber Operations at the University of Arizona's College of Information Science. He received his Ph.D in Instructional Technology from Ohio University in 2015, where he studied the educational uses of commercial extended reality games, working with Google X, later to become Niantic. In the intervening years, Dr. Straight's research interests have expanded to include cybersecurity education, leading to a second Master's degree, this time in Cybersecurity, in 2023.

Dr. Straight's primary areas of research involve the technological mediation in cybersecurity pedagogy, applying posthumanist and postphenomenological approaches to a highly technical field. Studying human-AI co-agency and the decentering of the human in cyber ethics, his work has been published in prominent cybersecurity education-related outlets like CPPJ, JCERP, and IEEE CARS. He has expanded upon this with a cyber ethics textbook, "Cyber Dimensions: Immersive Case Studies Across Digital Domains," set to be published in August 2025. Other forthcoming work involves posthumanist analyses of industry standard cyber education frameworks. He has received numerous awards and honors over the years, is Affiliated Faculty in U of A's Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing, and a collaborator in the Arizona Cybersecurity Clinic.

In his time at the University of Arizona, he has taught classes on human-computer interaction, R and data science, and a range of educational technology topics. He currently teaches cyber ethics at the undergraduate and graduate levels.