Ryan Straight

Dr. Ryan Straight is Director of Human-AI Collaboration and Pedagogy in the Arizona Cybersecurity Academy, Principal Investigator of the MA{VR}X Lab, and an Honors and Assistant Professor of Cyber Operations in the University of Arizona's College of Information Science, where he also coordinates and advises the MS in Cyber Operations. He earned his Ph.D. in Instructional Technology from Ohio University in 2015, studying the educational uses of commercial extended reality games with what became Niantic, and a second master's degree in Cybersecurity from the University of Arizona in 2023.

His research applies postphenomenology and posthumanist theory to cybersecurity education, with a focus on technological mediation, human-AI co-agency, and the workforce frameworks that define the field. His work appears in the Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice, the Cybersecurity Pedagogy and Practice Journal, CHAPTERS in Education, and IEEE CARS, and he is the author of the cyber ethics textbook Cyber Dimensions: Immersive Case Studies Across Digital Domains (Kendall Hunt, 2025) and its open companion methodology toolkit. He serves on the NICE K-12 Cybersecurity Education Conference planning committee, reviews Centers of Academic Excellence designation applications for the NSA and NCyTE, and is Affiliated Faculty in the Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing and a collaborator in the Arizona Cybersecurity Clinic.

He teaches cyber ethics at the undergraduate and graduate levels and has previously taught human-computer interaction, R and data science, and educational technology.