Hailing from Mississauga, Ontario, Ryan completed his undergraduate and graduate training at the University of Waterloo, where his thesis focused on the synthesis and mechanisms of cyclic lipodepsipeptide natural products related to daptomycin. Following his doctoral work, he joined the van der Donk Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign as a Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow. In the van der Donk lab, his research focused on the biosynthesis and mechanisms of ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified natural products (RiPPs). Ryan joined the University of Utah Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor in 2026, where his laboratory aims to uncover the structure–function relationships that govern the activity of peptide natural products, with the goal of accelerating the discovery and rational design of new bioactive peptides.
Research in the Moreira Lab is focused on the following areas:
- Elucidating the mechanisms of RiPP virulence factors at atomic resolution
- Developing chemical strategies for the modification and engineering of peptides
- Accelerating the discovery of bioactive peptides through structure–activity-guided genome mining
The Moreira Lab is a multidisciplinary research group in which members gain experience in organic synthesis, molecular biology, and biochemistry.