Ryan Hibbs graduated from Whitman College, a small liberal arts college in Washington State, with a combined degree in Chemistry/Biochemistry. During doctoral research at the University of California, San Diego, he studied ligand specificity and conformational changes in an ion channel ligand binding domain under the supervision of Dr. Palmer Taylor (Department of Pharmacology). As a post-doctoral fellow, he pursued structural and functional studies of ligand-gated ion channels in the laboratory of Dr. Eric Gouaux (HHMI/Vollum Institute). He joined the faculty in the Departments of Neuroscience (primary) and Biophysics (secondary) in 2012.

The Hibbs laboratory is pursuing atomic-scale mechanisms of synaptic proteins, with a current focus on ligand-gated ion channel structure and function. We employ a multidisciplinary approach encompassing molecular biology, protein biochemistry, pharmacology, electrophysiology, x-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy.