Sinéad M. Ryan (full name Sinéad Marie Ryan) is an Irish theoretical physicist and professor of theoretical high energy physics at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Her research focuses on high-energy particle physics, particularly the numerical simulation of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) to study how particles such as quarks and gluons interact.
Education and career
Ryan began her studies at University College Cork, Ireland, in 1988, earning a first-class honours B.Sc. in 1992 and a research M.Sc. in 1993. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in 1996.
Following her Ph.D., she was a research associate at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory from 1996 to 1999. She then joined Trinity College Dublin, where she held a series of positions: lecturer in high performance computing (1999–2000), tenured lecturer (2000–2006), senior lecturer (2006–2012), professor (2012–2016), and head of the School of Mathematics (2012–2016). In 2016, she was appointed Chair of Theoretical High Energy Physics, a position she continues to hold. As of 2020, she also serves as Head of the School of Mathematics at TCD.
Research
Ryan's research is in lattice QCD, a numerical approach to studying the strong nuclear force. Her work has included investigations of hadron spectroscopy, bottomonium at finite temperature, charmonium spectroscopy, and heavy quark physics. She has authored or co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications and has an h-index of 26 (per Google Scholar, with approximately 3,995 citations as of recent data).
Professional service and leadership
Ryan has served as a journal and grant referee for Physical Review D, Physical Review Letters, Physics Letters B, the National Science Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and the Irish Research Council. She has been a member of the Wilson Prize in Lattice QCD Committee and the International Advisory Committee for the Symposium in Lattice Field Theory at CERN (2013–present). She served as chair of the PANDA Theory Advisory Group (2016–present) and chair of the PRACE Scientific Steering Committee (2017–present). In 2021, she was Spokesperson for the CERN Ireland Users Group. She was a founding academic partner of the Trinity Walton Club in 2014. In December 2022, she was appointed to the Irish Research Council by Minister Simon Harris.
Honours and recognition
In 2023, Ryan was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy. She has held visiting professorships including the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Visiting Professor at the IHES, France (2017), and the August-Wilhelm Scheer Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Technische Universität München (2016/17). She has also been a Clare Hall Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University.
