Ryan Chaban is Director of Fusion Prize Design at XPRIZE, where he leads the design of a fusion prize aimed at accelerating commercial fusion, the first of a set of energy abundance prizes in design within XPRIZE's Energy + Climate + Nature domain. Prior to XPRIZE, Ryan was a Fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), where he scouted early-stage technology across fusion, fission, geothermal, grid, and critical minerals, reviewed more than 250 proposals, and designed ARPA-E's plasma chemistry program from initial concept to launch-ready.

Ryan holds a Ph.D. in Physics from William & Mary, where he ran the first experiment to measure differences in neutral fueling between isotopes on the DIII-D tokamak, and has also worked on the MAST tokamak in the UK. He holds a B.S.E. in Engineering Physics from Case Western Reserve University and teaches Clean Energy Innovation as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.