Erin Ryan is an animal welfare scientist and co-founder/co-director of Animals in the Room (AiR), an international collaborative project that seeks to include animals as individual subjects in decision-making processes. Her work explores how technology, arts, psychology, and ethically grounded participatory methods can be wrapped around scientific understanding of animals to make nonhuman animals viscerally present in decision-making and amplify their perspectives. She holds a MSc and a PhD in Applied Animal Biology from UBC with a broad focus that includes animal behaviour (cows and great apes), social attitudes towards the treatment of animals, and the psychology of how we can take the perspectives of non-human animals. Most recently, she completed her postdoctoral research at NYU, focusing on establishing collaborations between academics and leading thinkers in political philosophy, governance, psychology, animal communication, technology, and the arts to advance AiR’s mission.
Erin came to do her pre-requisite courses to get into veterinary medicine, but ended up falling in love with the possibility that the work of animal welfare science posed to changing the difficult realities that many animals face. The professors in the program were doing work she respected, and they were hugely supportive of their students. For these reasons, her interest grew and she ended up staying on for all her degrees so she could do a deep dive into understanding animals’ experience in relationship to us, humans, how they express that and how we can push the boundaries of science and ourselves to listen and be accountable to their interests.
Going forward, Erin Ryan wishes to continue to build Animals in the Room, to spend more time with animals of all kinds (including the ones in her family), and to listen more to the living world.