Ryan Ziels graduated in 2011 with his baccalaureate in Environmental Resources Engineering from California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. He received his Master’s degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Washington (Seattle) in 2013, and his PhD from the same program in 2016. While at the University of Washington, Ryan was supervised and mentored by Dr. H. David Stensel, and also worked in the lab of Dr. Dave Stahl. He also received two NSF Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) fellowships to study for 1 year at the Biogas Research Center in Linköping, Sweden (2014) as well as the Laboratory of Microbiology at Wageningen University, Netherlands (2016). In 2017, he joined the department of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, as an Assistant Professor. He is also an associated faculty member of the Genome Science and Technology (GSAT) and Environmental Engineering programs at UBC.