Ryan Searcy

Ryan Searcy is a Ph.D. student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Stanford University, and is a member of the Boehm Research Group and the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory (EFML). His research involves using data science and observational techniques to investigate how environmental processes affect various facets of coastal health such as water quality, marine biodiversity and fishery sustainability. He is interested in how these relationships can be leveraged to improve coastal health monitoring and management. Ryan’s projects include development of advanced techniques for predicting beach water quality, time series analyses of environmental DNA (eDNA) shed by imperiled salmon and trout populations in a coastal stream, and physical oceanography experiments measuring water circulation at a chronically-polluted California beach.

Ryan’s work has been funded through a Stanford Graduate Fellowship and a USC Sea Grant Traineeship. He has collaborated with diverse groups such as the California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). He has presented his research to the SWRCB Data Science Symposium and the ASLO Aquatic Sciences Meeting, and has helped chair a conference session at the 2021 Ocean Sciences Meeting.

Ryan has lived in California all of his life. Prior to joining Stanford, he worked for LA-based non-profit Heal the Bay, developing and implementing a beach water quality ‘NowCast’ system that spanned the California coast, and advocating for better water policy on the local and state levels. He previously worked as an air pollution control engineer for the County of San Diego, and as a research assistant for the Air-Sea Interaction Lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Ryan attended UC San Diego, where he earned a B.S. in environmental engineering in 2013, and a M.S. in mechanical engineering (with a fluid dynamics focus) in 2014.