[1] Ryan graduated in 1978 from Macquarie University,[4] beginning her studies in actuarial science but shifting to statistics under the mentorship of Don McNeil.
Her dissertation, The Weighted Normal Plot II: Efficiency of Tests for Carcinogenicity, was supervised by Arthur P.
[1] In 2009, she returned to Australia as Chief of the Division of Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics at CSIRO.
[7] In 2012 she became a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science for "developing and applying statistical methods to diverse areas of public interest, including financial risk, climate change and cancer".
Other notable figures to receive the prestigious award include authors Margaret Atwood (1990) and Susan Sontag (1991).