Christopher Ryan

Christopher and his work have been featured just about everywhere, including MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, Playboy, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Outside, Salon, Seed, Big Think, and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. 

Chris has been a featured speaker all over the world, from TED in Long Beach, CA to Ciudad de las Ideas in Mexico to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House. He's consulted at various hospitals, provided expert testimony in a Canadian constitutional case, and contributed to publications both scholarly and popular.

Even before co-authoring the New York Times best-seller, Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships with partner-in-crime Cacilda Jethá, MD, he was on a wild ride. After receiving a BA in English and American literature in 1984, he spent several decades traveling around the world, pausing in unexpected places to work at decidedly odd jobs (e.g., gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to prostitutes in Bangkok and self-defense to land-reform activists in Mexico, managing commercial real-estate in New York’s Diamond District, helping Spanish physicians publish their research). In his mid-30s, Chris decided to pursue doctoral studies in Psychology.

Drawing upon his multi-cultural experience, Chris' research focused on distinguishing the human from the cultural, first by focusing on shamanism and ethnobotany—studying how various societies interact with novel states of consciousness and sacred plants—and later, by looking at similarly diverse cultural perspectives on sexuality. His doctoral dissertation analyzed the prehistoric roots of human sexuality and was guided by the world-renowned psychologist Stanley Krippner, at Saybrook Graduate School, in San Francisco, CA.