Professor Bailey received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Eastern Illinois University in 1999. He then went on Northwestern University, obtaining his Ph.D. in 2004. While at Northwestern, Ryan was the recipient of an American Chemical Society graduate student fellowship. Following a joint post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology and the Institute for Systems Biology, he joined the faculty at Illinois in 2006. Ryan is also affiliated with the University of Illinois' Institute for Genomic Biology