Ryan Mehl is currently an Associate Professor in the Biochemistry and Biophysics Department at Oregon State University where he is also the Director of the Unnatural Protein Facility. He is also a faculty member in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Program, and adjunct faculty member in the Chemistry Department at OSU.

Ryan is a native of the United States. He was an undergraduate at Moravian College, the 6th oldest college in America, where he worked with Professor Daniel Libby to determine the mechanism of hydride transfer for NAD(P)H. He obtained his PhD at Cornell University in organic chemistry, working with Professor Tadhg Begley on the repair mechanisms of DNA lesions and the biosynthesis of thiamin. He was a post-doctoral scholar at the Scripps Research Institute with Professor Peter Schultz were he engineered the first self-sufficient unnatural organism in 2001.

In 2002 Ryan joined the faculty at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster Pennsylvania to assist in building their first Biochemistry program. He was tenured to the Franklin and Marshall Chemistry Department in 2008. In 2011 he moved Oregon state university as tenured Associate professor to the Biochemistry and Biophysics Department and Director of the worlds first Unnatural Protein Facility. His current research interests are described in the Research pages.