“I don't think you could ask a kid growing up in Aroostook, New Brunswick, what they'll end up doing and have them answer, ‘I'm going to be a professor at Yale.’”  

But for Dr. Ryan McNeil (BPhil’03, MPhil’06), that unlikely trajectory became a reality, shaping a career not only rooted in curiosity and community, but also in a commitment to reducing harm for society’s most marginalized.   

Today, Ryan is a faculty member at Yale’s School of Medicine, working at the forefront of research on substance use, housing vulnerability, and public health.  

But long before Yale, Ryan was a kid growing up in rural N.B., in a place where community was strong, but the future felt narrowly defined.    

Like many students from small towns, he imagined that the world was bigger than what he could see. “I was finishing high school with this sense of wanting to do something more.”   

The first real widening of that horizon came when Ryan was accepted into the inaugural cohort of Renaissance College, now the School of Leadership Studies, at UNB.   

A place to explore — and to become    

Ryan describes Renaissance College as a turning point. It offered him space to think broadly and imagine a future beyond the obvious.    

For him, the opportunities for national and international internships, layered in with an interdisciplinary curriculum, would give him the chance to explore and be engaged with more established disciplines, while benefiting from small class sizes.    

“Work that was bringing together art, social sciences, humanities and sciences really appealed to me as someone who really just wanted to figure out what it was in the world that I could do or wanted to do.”   

Living in the Maggie Jean Chestnut residence, where his mother coincidentally had also lived two decades earlier as a UNB student, blurred the lines between academic and communal life. For Ryan, conversations spilled out of classrooms and into kitchens and late‑night study sessions.   

“In that space, you live together, you cook together, you took classes together.   

That meant you had that deep engagement embedded across everything you did. The residence was attached to the building, so we would just move back and forth. It would not be unusual that we would be up until 10, 11, 12, working on group projects in our little classrooms and then cross over to the residence side to go to bed.”  

Following the work   

After completing his undergraduate degree, Ryan went on to complete a master’s degree at UNB. After graduation, Ryan’s path unfolded organically. His first move was to Ottawa to coordinate a national study focused on homelessness.   

That work illuminated something essential for him. “It was an opportunity to apply a lot of the direct research skills that I had developed through my undergrad and master's at UNB. By taking charge of this study, I was seeking to understand how we can better deliver care to folks who are homeless or vulnerably housed with advanced care needs as they are transitioning to end of life.”   

He realized this is what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Research that allowed him to partner with communities, addressing structural inequities and responding to urgent social harms felt both intellectually compelling, but also morally necessary.   

Ryan’s next step took him west to Vancouver, one of the world’s leading hubs for research on substance use, harm reduction and housing vulnerability, to complete his PhD at the University of British Columbia (UBC).    

There, he immersed himself in community‑engaged research, examining how social structures shape harm for people who use drugs, particularly those facing overlapping inequities tied to poverty, criminalization, colonialism and racism.    

Vancouver was not just a geographic move, but a deepening of purpose.   

Following his PhD, Ryan remained in Vancouver as a postdoctoral fellow and later a faculty member within UBC’s department of medicine and scientist with the BC Centre on Substance Use.    

“It’s one of the most established and impactful centres for substance use research globally.”    

Continuing the work   

Wanting to be closer to family as he was starting his own, Ryan eventually returned east — this time landing at Yale School of Medicine, where he now holds faculty appointments, while maintaining long‑standing research partnerships in Vancouver.   

At Yale, Ryan continues his work on vulnerable populations, examining how forces that operate within the risk environments of people who use drugs shape risk and harm. He also regularly provides expert advice to health care organizations and governments on the development, implementation and optimization of harm reduction and addiction treatment interventions. 

Ryan's commitment to equity-focused research and community-driven solutions will soon bring him back to Canada. After several years at Yale, he began looking for an opportunity to return home and continue work that addresses the intersecting challenges of housing insecurity, drug toxicity and health inequities. 

“Amidst attacks on equity-focused research, marginalized populations and Canadian sovereignty in the U.S., I looked for an opportunity to return to Canada.” 

In July 2027, Ryan will join the University of Ottawa as the inaugural Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair in Equity-Oriented Responses to the Drug Toxicity and Housing Crises. The appointment is part of a federal initiative designed to attract leading researchers from outside Canada. 

Looking back on his journey, Ryan credits much of his success to the mentorship and support he received at UNB and Renaissance College. 

“I benefited so much from amazing mentorship and support, and I am where I am as a product of that. For the first time in my life, I saw people who do work adjacent to the types of things that I do now... having that modelled out as something that I could possibly do. That really carried across the work that I’ve done since.”