Presently, I am an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Stony Brook University affiliated with the Department of Technology and Society and the Department of Computer Science. Previously, I held the position of Tatelbaum Scholar at Phillips Academy, Andover, cross-appointed between the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and the Tang Institute. I completed my PhD in philosophy at MIT. 

My interests are bifurcated between matters of applied ethics on the one hand (Bioethics, Ethics of Technology) and matters of the heart on the other (Existentialism, Buddhist Philosophy, Aesthetics). Presently, I also hold a staff position as a program assistant at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center (CIMC), following in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition, and I collaborate with the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University on a grant-funded research project concerning effective and equitable pedagogy within K-12 public school systems in Durham County.

During Summer, 2023, I was part of the instructional team for the Intelligence, Data, Ethics, and Society Program at the Ethics Institute of Northeastern University. In Spring, 2022, I was the Ethical Thinking Instructor for an engineering course on climate and sustainability within the MIT Department of New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET). In Summer 2021, I served as an Ethics of Technology Teaching Fellow in a program piloted by the Office of Experiential Learning at MIT. In 2020-2021, I held a competitively awarded Teaching Development Fellowship in the MIT Teaching & Learning Laboratory. 

You can learn more about my teaching here.

Before MIT, I completed a B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley. I lived at Allen Ginsberg's old cottage address, which he wrote a poem about here. In my spare time, I write long-form fantasy about houseplants. I send chapters on request.

You can email me at ryan.ravanpak@stonybrook.edu or ravanpak@alum.mit.edu.

My CV can be found here.