Ryan Kelly

Ryan Kelly is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Brigham Young University (BYU). He received his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from BYU in 2005 and spent the next 13 years at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he ultimately served as Senior Research Scientist, Manager and Chief Technologist for EMSL, a national scientific user facility at PNNL. He joined the faculty of BYU in 2018.

A central theme of Dr. Kelly’s research has been the development of new technological solutions for ultrasensitive biochemical analyses. He has developed ultra-low-flow electrospray ionization sources, improved MS ion optics and custom separations based on nanoflow liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis. Dr. Kelly’s efforts have recently focused on overcoming the losses and inefficiencies associated with sample isolation and processing of biological samples for MS-based proteomic analyses. To this end, his team developed nanoPOTS (Nanodroplet Processing in One pot for Trace Samples), which enables for the first time the in-depth profiling of protein expression from single cells and makes possible high-resolution proteome imaging of tissues. His research continues to focus on improvements in sensitivity, throughput and quantification for single-cell proteomics and other sample-limited analyses.

Dr. Kelly has authored or coauthored more than 100 publications and is a named inventor on several patents that have been licensed and commercialized by companies including Bruker, Cellenion and his own recent startup, MicrOmics Technologies. His work has been recognized with several awards including two R&D 100 awards, a Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer, the Georges Guiochon HPLC Faculty Fellowship and the HTC Innovation Award.