Professor Ryan O'Donnell received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from MIT in 2003 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study (2003–04) and at Microsoft Research Redmond (2004–06). Since 2006 he has been faculty in the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University.

Ryan O'Donnell's research interests are in quantum computing and information theory, approximability of optimization problems, spectral graph theory, analysis of Boolean functions, probability, and complexity theory. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal ACM Transactions on Computation, and the recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship, the IAS von Neumann Fellowship, the Okawa Research Grant, the NSF Career Award, and multiple best paper awards at the Computational Complexity Conference.