Gery Ryan (Ph. D., University of Florida, 1995) is a Senior Behavioral Scientist at the RAND Corporation and Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs at the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Policy Analysis. Ryan s research focuses on social factors in mental and physical health, and includes studies on HIV/AIDS, depression, serious mental illness, childhood diarrhea and acute respiratory illnesses, obesity and complementary and alternative medicine. He has worked extensively in Latin America and Africa on health-related issues and helped redesign and implement a large-scale education reform in Qatar. As a methodologist, Ryan has published widely on the application of systematic methods to qualitative research. Over the last 20 years, he has run workshops sponsored by NSF, NIH, CDC and WHO on qualitative research methods and has taught these methods at UCLA, Pardee RAND, and the University of Missouri.