Ryan Sweke is the Alexander von Humboldt German Research Chair of Mathematics and its Applications at AIMS, as well as a senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University. He leads the Quantum at AIMS group, whose research is focused on a wide variety of topics under the broad umbrella of quantum computing and quantum information.

Ryan completed his PhD at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2017, with a focus on quantum algorithms for the simulation of open quantum systems. After this he spent almost five years (2018-2022) as a post-doctoral researcher in the group of Jens Eisert at the Freie Universität Berlin, first as an Alexander von Humboldt post-doctoral fellow (2018-2019) and then as a senior post-doc of the PlanQK project, the flagship quantum machine learning initiative of the German government. After his time in Berlin, Ryan then spent just over two years as a research scientist at IBM Quantum, in San Jose, California (2022-2024) before joining AIMS as German Research Chair in January 2025.