Ryan Slaby
PhD Candidate
Ryan Joseph Slaby officially joined the ARTIS Lab in March of 2026. As funded by the FWF project Synching Minds Beyond the Face, their current position focuses on curating an exhibition to promote prosocial attitudes towards autistic individuals. They further will collaborate on projects centered on neuroscientific techniques, as they hold expertise in both neuroimaging and neuromodulation. They hold a strong interest towards the application of arts research on society, such as positive impacts of art exhibitions on attitudes towards queer populations and of art practice on the well-being of persons with neurodegenerative disease.
I stand within the intersection of the arts and neuroscience to foster societal change. My projects span across the philosophy of aesthetics, neural correlates of negative aesthetic evaluations, the role of the cerebellum in feeling moved, museum studies, alongside creativity and art production.
Raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Ryan holds a BSc in Neuroscience from Georgia State University with trainings in social and behavioral neuroscience. They further completed a post-bac at the Georgia State/Georgia Tech Center for Advanced Brain Imaging focused on the neural impact of reading interventions in children with developmental dyslexia. As they practiced the visual arts since childhood, these trainings were sought to solidify their expertise to tackle their initial field interest, neuroaesthetics.
Accordingly, they completed a MSc in Applied Experimental Psychology and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Milan-Bicocca with theses on these topics. Ryan further completed a post-doc position at the University of Padua, where they investigated the neural correlates between symmetry and basic visual perception alongside the cross-cultural impacts of medieval and renaissance art within Italy and the Czech Republic.