Memories
Remembering David T. Ryan in the United Kingdom
Ripon Grammar School
Obituary Dr David Ryan
Posted by: louise on Dec 01, 2004 - 03:33 PM
From Ripon Gazette 16/07/04
David Ryan died in Albany, USA, on Tuesday, June 29 2004. His death was a result of a tragic road accident while he was out cycling – a sport he had enjoyed since childhood.
David was 32 years old – a young man of powerful intellect with enormous potential, at the beginning of a promising career. He was the elder son of Anne and Tom Ryan of Bishop Monkton and brother to Antony.
David was a pupil at Ripon Grammar School from 1983 until 1990 and his former teacher Mr John Saul recalls: “His academic record was faultless. It was in the sixth form that it became clear just what an outstanding scholar he was. He was a ‘straight-A’ student at A-level , winning the school prize for Physics and going on to study the subject at Oxford University.
“David was unfailingly gentle and kind with everyone. He was modest, even a little shy, and always sensitive to the needs of others. He had an active sense of fun, but never at the expense of others. Integrity such as his is encountered only rarely. It is a privilege to have known him.”
David’s Oxford College was St Edmund Hall where he rowed for the first VIII. In his final examinations he not only gained a first class honours degree, but was awarded the highest marks in his year and the Scott Prize. His tutor, Prof Nick Stone, wrote to him with his results, saying: “Words fail me. Fantastically well done.”
David continued at St Edmund Hall until he had completed his D Phil and then went into employment with Oxford Instruments before he was offered a position with General Electric which took him to America to work on MRI scanners. There he was project leader working on the development of next generation magnet technology. He was the primary author of a proposal to the US National Institute for Health for the development of a very novel M R System, which was awarded to the company just a week before his death. Matthew Scagnelli at GE Research centre wrote: “David was a brilliant scientist and a pleasure to work with. He will be missed very much by his team.
David loved to speed-hike, distance run and travel, but his passion was cycling. His ultimate goal was to join the British 300,000 mile club. He had already covered over 100,000 miles.
Tributes to David are coming from his many friends and colleagues. Walter Cicha from America wrote: “Life is full of incomprehensible twists and turns, but there must be some good scheme behind the confusion of it all. Dave and I used to discuss this topic too.”
From Mark Zotto came the words: ”I feel cheated that he can no longer be my bike buddy and friend but more so, I feel that all his friends and family have lost someone who was, quite simply put, a very nice person and a wonderful human being.”
Oxford Cycling Club
Dave Ryan was a member of OUCC for many years in the 1990's, who was tragically killed by on oncoming motorist in Albany, USA, in summer 2004. A quietly spoken character could not hide his affection for adverse conditions and exceptionally long, hard rides, particularly if he was allowed to go on the front for the whole duration. Modesty prevented most of his fellow cyclists realising he got the top first in his year, and at the time of his death he had just been given a big grant from the American Health Department to work on the next generation of MRI cancer scanners. Dave's dependable, polite demenour will be missed as much as his back wheel in the headwind past Stadhampton. More information and a great picture of Dave in his Dunlopillo top holding a glass of wine is on his club's website or at his memorial website.
David T. Ryan by Andrew Williams
David and I first bumped into each other in the office of Dr W.S.C. Williams (Bill), a physics tutor at St. Edmund Hall Oxford during Michaelmas Term (around the middle of October) 1990.
At that meeting, as keen eyed 18 year olds with a clutch of ‘A’ grade A-levels under our belts, we were nervous about starting at a degree in Physics at one of the countries top universities, while at the same time, excited about what lay ahead.
That year, there was an intake of around 10 students for physics at our college. The tutors wasted no time in setting us some work to keep us out of the bar. What we didn’t realise was that the work served not just that purpose, but also the secret aim of pairing the students off according to their ability for the upcoming tutorials (teaching at Oxford being tutorial based).
I was lucky enough to be paired off with David T. Ryan. We spent the first year at college drinking, socialising, working from time to time, and generally enjoying the student lifestyle. At the end of the first year, we sat our ‘first public examinations’ – which we needed to pass in order to progress to the second year of the course. David passed with a Scholarship (which meant he did rather well, and the college awarded him £300 for his efforts), and I managed to scrape an Open Exhibition (which meant I also did rather well, though not as well as David, and the college awarded me £150 for my efforts).
During the last term of the first year, we needed to fix up accommodation for the second year. A small gang us of, David, myself, Helen Spink, Julie Coulson and Jack Harris, rented a house in a less than illustrious suburb of Oxford called Cowley.
The second year was really when David got heavily into his sport. He would regularly be out on the river at 5 or 6am, go to lectures for a few hours until perhaps 12 noon, then go for a 15 mile bike ride before tutorials in the afternoon, at perhaps 3pm, before going back to the river for an hour or two, before finally ‘going home’ for dinner. As I recall, he dumped his girlfriend Harriet during the second year, because she and his sporting ambition were just not compatible. Such was Dave.
It was during that time that David, Julie and myself became very close friends. We got expert at dividing pans of Pasta equally into three portions, bottles of wine into three, etc. Rarely an evening went by when we would not be together, usually in my room, watching TV, or completing work for upcoming tutorials. In general, we enjoyed life. David’s room in the rented house managed to decompose over time. My memory is actually clouded over whether or not his room actually had carpet or not. I think we saw it when we moved in, and perhaps once again when we moved out. The rest of the time it was generally knee deep in sportswear, text books, bikes, and scribbled notes. Despite that, David always seemed to know in which general area any particular item would be located. We also got into a routine of David sleeping at lectures, with me frantically making copious notes (though not always understanding them). The deal was a simple one – David got to copy my notes, and I got the benefit of him explaining to me what was meant by them. It worked.
Then we got into the third year – and finals. We worked our socks off that year, and watched any number of historians and lawyers do their exams before us poor scientists (draw your own conclusions on that one). We worked through every single question on every single examination paper which had been set for Physics from 1980 to 1992. We were ready. Finals lasted about two weeks, with generally two 3 or 4 hours exams per day for the entire period, with only Sunday for rest - it was tough. We both commented that having ‘done’ a particular exam and subject, we could feel entire sections of brain going into ‘erase’ mode. Comments like ‘ok, now we can forget all about thermodynamics’. We compared notes at the end of each exam, and more often than not, we compared our answers to the trickiest questions – sometimes they matched, and other times not – we would generally know who had got it right with hindsight. We finished finals, and got mighty drunk. Now we just had to wait.
Results day. We had both made the journey back to Oxford to look at the door of examination schools for the results. We had both scored First Class Honours degrees. This put us both in the top 20% of all Oxford candidates who sat the physics finals examinations that year. This was shortly followed by a breakdown of individual paper results. We were in for a shock.
David had not only got a First Class Honours degree in Physics from Oxford, he had got the top First. This meant that summed over all the papers we sat, that out of more than 200 physics students at Oxford University that year, David had the highest combined score of any candidate. Now bearing in mind that only around the top 1% of all A-level students actually get a place at Oxford in the first instance, this mathematically puts him in the top 0.5% of the top 1% of all physicists in Great Britain at that time.
As a result of getting the top First, David was awarded the Scott Prize in Physics. This is a small bursary of money to the student who performed best in the finals examinations at Oxford – but more than that, it was recognition of his fantastic ability as a scientist and scholar. Many a student in his position would have let this go to their heads - but not David. He took it in his stride, and it was in fact some weeks after he was awarded the prize before he told anyone. Everyone around him could see his brilliance - and I think David knew he was brilliant too, but he showed great humility with others, and was far more likely to help than to mock. This got us to the summer of 1993.
Then the fun started !
We both decided, more out of laziness than anything else, that having one of these doctorate things might be fun. So we decided to stay at Oxford for another three years to get one.
So after the summer break, David, Julie and myself, went back to Oxford to rent another house for the forthcoming studies. Again in Cowley, but in a slightly less ‘student rich’ area near a shopping centre.
To cut a long story short, we lived together as a small group for a further three years in Cowley. David covered more miles on his bike than I did in my car. We hid from the landlord, and watched same burn the back lawn to a cinder because we'd let the grass grow 4 feet tall. We exploded plastic bottles with track pumps. By experiment, we worked out that 1.5 litre bottles of wine works out at almost precisely 3 pint glasses full. We cooked popcorn by the bin liner full. We had our ups and our downs, but we never fell out. It was business as usual. David completed his D.Phil., I completed my D.Phil., and Julie worked as a manager for Tandy (Radio Shack). Julie and I decided that it might be nice to get married.
We then started to get serious about jobs, and David continued to work at the university with Harry Jones but with Oxford Instruments backing. I got a job at a computer software company, and we once again wound up living under the same roof, for another year, this time with Fred – a magnet technician from the university.
It was then the end of 1997. We parted ways properly – except that we stayed in very regular contact, with David coming to stay with us on more than one occasion. When Julie and I got married in September 1998, I had no hesitation in wanting David to be our best man, and indeed he was the best best man you could ask for. We had a great stag weekend in Wales – we went quad biking, and drinking, and generally larking about.
As soon as David told me that he'd been head hunted to work for GE in the USA, I had always expected David to be similarly head hunted by an attractive cheerleader soon after his arrival. I think his native Yorkshire values probably hindered him in his pursuit a tad. However, when I got a call from his family, I had the honest expectation that he was getting married, and couldn’t reach us because we had only just moved house and hadn't yet sent out an updated address or phone number. To hear instead of his tragic death knocked me sideways, first shock, then a sense of loss, then anger. For the first time in many years, I cried.
As events unfold, I further heard that the cause of his death was some 18 year old Joshua and his uninsured modified car, with his previous speeding offences somehow miraculously changed through some crazy thing called 'plea-bargain' down to ‘parking on the highway’. It frankly makes my blood boil with fury.
I was honoured to attend David’s funeral in his home village, and was truly touched to see so many of his friends and colleagues also attend. David would have been surprised to see such a large attendance, and I’m sure he would have been the first to reach the food at the reception later. I have a spooky feeling that he was in fact present at the reception, and I’m sure, even as a physicist, that our paths will cross again one day. The funny thing is, that while we were studying for our doctorates, we often commented on the ‘conveyer belt’ that is Oxford University – with new people turning up every year, following a largely predictable personal development and educational drill. We observed that if you were to take a snapshot at yearly intervals, the faces and personalities would stay broadly the same, and only the names and calendar would have changed. I’d like to think that somewhere within the university, right now, there is another David T. Ryan, and that the only reason we can’t see him is that we’re stuck in the wrong bit of the calendar.
Nothing will bring my best friend back. And his loss is truly tragic in the proper sense of the word. One individual, through reckless actions has killed a ‘one in a million’ scientist, and my very dear personal friend. Instead of posting $20,000 bail, his family might like to donate a similar amount to the scholarship fund set up in David's name.
I’ll finish by saying something I’ve said to Dave more than a thousand times before.
‘See you Dave’. God Bless.
Remembering David T. Ryan in the United States
One life taken from Earth, many gifts lost
by Walter Cicha
Times Union June 14, 2005
He Wasn't Home For Christmas
by Walter Cicha, Ph.D.
www.AdkSportsFitness.com (January, 2005)
"These are the lyrics and chords for the song that I wrote in memory of Dave"
by Walter V. Cicha
Fund-Raising Memorial Ride for Safety Awareness October 9th
by Walter Cicha
On June 29th, one of the MHCC’s elite riders was killed in Clifton Park by a speeding motorist while on a regular training ride. British citizen David Ryan was the epitome of focus and precision. Whether busily carrying out research at the GE Global Research Center on the next generation of magnetic resonance imaging instruments or vying for position in the lead pack of a New York or New England road race, Dave always gave 100 % and finished every challenge with a big grin. It is cruelly ironic that a couple weeks before his untimely demise he told me that he is thinking about quitting bike racing because sometimes it seemed too dangerous. Serious words coming from someone who had cycled well over 100,000 miles and was ranked amongst the best of British cyclists for a couple years during the 1990s…
David was an exceedingly rare type of person. He could have potentially won a Nobel Prize and would not have told even his parents about it. He could be incredibly deep one minute and rather comically base the next. Such is one trademark of genius, which David definitely possessed. Those who were lucky enough to befriend David can consider themselves blessed. His carefully nurtured friendship was one of the many gifts he gave on two continents in his tragically brief life.
On October 9th, David’s life and what would have been his 33rd birthday will be celebrated via the “David T. Ryan Ride for Safety Awareness.” The event will feature two rides, the first a 29-mile clockwise loop around the Mohawk River for all levels of riders, involving roads and the bike path, while the other ride will be an easy 11-mile out-and-back ramble solely along the bike path, intended strictly for beginner and casual riders. MHCC is hosting both events while GE is the major sponsor. More information can be found at www.davidtryan.com, the official David Ryan memorial website. In addition to the registration/entry form provided in this issue and at various venues throughout the area, e-registration is available via http://www.active.com/event_detail.cfm?event_id=1166564.
The ultimate purpose behind the October 9th rides is two-fold. Firstly, it is to significantly increase road safety awareness in the Capital District. County and state police will be involved and the event will have significant media coverage – this is already being arranged, with some help from GE. Secondly, the event will raise money for the “David T. Ryan Scholarship Fund.” The fund will be used to allow a top science student from an area high school (TBA) to continue his/her studies at the university level. A stipulation will be that the student is both academically brilliant and athletically accomplished, to honor David’s legacy. GE has made a considerable contribution to this fund and it is hoped that a lot more will be raised via the October 9th event entry donations.
I am sure I speak for many others when I hope that David did not die in vain, and that the terrible tragedy will result in some good on multiple levels for as many people as possible.
Dedications
Noble “American,” Global British Citizen
by Walter Cicha
Why?
A Song written for Dave
by Walt Cicha, arranged by G. Tyc, recorded 12/23 & 12/30, 2004 in Vancouver, BC, Canada
Scientific American Seminar - October 8, 2004
Dedicated to the Memory of David Ryan
by Walter Cicha
Letter to Ryans from Richard A. Evans
Dear Ryans,
I want to express my greatest sympathies for the loss of your son David. I am sorry I never had the privilege of meeting him.
I am writing to let you know that there are people in the US and in the community in which David lived who care deeply about his death and the circumstances surrounding it.
Since July I have been working with local Districts Attorney, local politicians, and recently with Doris Aiken, head of an international effort against drunk driving to try to bring change in New York State laws and policies so that the likelihood of a similar occurrence is minimized if not eliminated.
I have been in contact with Walter Cicha on these matters. We have made some progress, for example, in getting the local District Attorney (chief prosecutor) to alter his policies regarding plea bargains for people who are given speeding tickets.
I want much more far reaching changes in law and policy and am determined to not rest until these changes occur. I just wanted you to know that.
My deepest regards,
Richard A. Evans