Ryan J. Taft, Ph.D., is senior director of Scientific Research at Illumina, with a focus on the development and deployment of diagnostic whole-genome sequencing worldwide for children with rare and undiagnosed genetic disease. He leads a team within Population and Medical Genomics that includes the Illumina Clinical Services Laboratory.

Previously, Ryan was a group leader and senior research fellow at the University of Queensland, where he still holds a partial appointment, and he is an adjunct associate professor at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in a variety of well-regarded journals and has led or contributed to teams responsible for the discovery of six genetic conditions.

Ryan holds various positions within industry organizations. He is a founding member of the Global Leukodystrophy Initiative, scientific advisor to the Mission Massimo Foundation, and co-chair of the Medical and Scientific advisory board of Global Genes.

Ryan obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of California, Davis, on a Regent's Scholarship, and his Ph.D. in Genomics and Computational Biology from the University of Queensland on a US National Science Graduate Foundation Research Fellowship.