Dr. Ryan Keenan is a Research Fellow in the Department of Physiology at Monash University. Ryan completed his PhD at The University of Melbourne and Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in 2020, under the supervision of A/Prof. Laura Jacobson and Prof. Steve Petrou. Following his thesis submission, Ryan completed a 5-month full-time internship with the consulting company Biointelect through the Australian Postgraduate Research Intern (APR.Intern) program. Following the internship, Ryan continued work with Biointelect and gained valuable industry and commercialisation experience.   

During his PhD, Ryan’s research focused on the proposed bidirectional relationship between neurodegenerative disorders and sleep impairments. In particular, Ryan investigated the role that mutant tau overexpression plays in mediating sleep disruptions and cognitive deficits in a neurodegenerative tau transgenic mouse model. Ryan’s experiments interrogated how genetic modulation of tau expression and pharmacological manipulation of sleep impacted the phenotype of the transgenic mouse model. Ryan is interested in the role that sleep plays in various neurological disorders.

In 2021, Ryan joined the Cowley Laboratory (Metabolic Neurophysiology) at Monash University.