Ryan Straight, bearded and wearing a dark cardigan over a light blue shirt, stands on a street in Edinburgh in May 2026, with Edinburgh Castle on the hill behind him.

Ryan Straight, Ph.D

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I’m an Honors and Assistant Professor of Cyber Operations in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona. I direct the MA{VR}X Lab, coordinate and advise for our MS in Cyber Operations, and teach cyber law, ethics, and policy. My research leans on postphenomenology and posthumanist theory to ask what technologies actually do to the people using them. These days that mostly means what happens to learning and judgment when AI starts doing part of the work, both in cyber classrooms and in the security jobs our graduates go into. I came to cybersecurity by way of instructional technology (Ph.D., Ohio University, 2015), then went back for an MS in Cybersecurity here at Arizona in 2023. I also wrote Cyber Dimensions: Immersive Case Studies Across Digital Domains (Kendall Hunt, 2025).