4/15/2022 William Gillespie
Phil Ryan is a recipient of the 2022 Alumni Award for Distinguished Service as given by the Grainger College of Engineering.
Written by William Gillespie
Phil Ryan (BSIE 1978) is a recipient of the 2022 Alumni Award for Distinguished Service as given by the Grainger College of Engineering. He is also the recipient of the 2019 ISE Distinguished Alumni Award.
When Phil Ryan came to the University of Illinois from Columbus, Indiana, around 1974, student life was a little different. For example, out-of-state students like Ryan were in a very slim minority. With fewer international students in attendance at that time, the student population was almost entirely Illinoisian. But Phil didn’t want to go to Purdue: “I wanted to do something different.”
His student experience started off on the wrong foot. He had been slow in applying for housing. At that time, the students who were too late to get a dorm room were assigned to a lounge in the dormitory. The lounge was filled with bunk beds, like an army barracks. As students with dorm rooms dropped out or changed housing, the students sleeping in the lounge were, one by one, allocated the empty beds.
Perhaps it was in part due to this rugged introduction to dormitory living that Phil embraced his next housing opportunity. According to Phil, in addition to his engineering education, the other “jewel” of his undergraduate career was life in the fraternity Alpha Delta Phi. He found his house to be a great place to live, and a successful model of “self-governance.” Some of his fraternity brothers remain his closest friends to this day.
Phil had chosen Industrial Engineering as a major naturally. The origins of IE are closely tied to manufacturing, and IE in the 1970s had a “heavy manufacturing focus,” according to Ryan. Phil’s dad was an industrialist, and Phil grew up among conversations about industrial processes and factory visits. At that time, IE and General Engineering had yet to merge to form ISE, and IE was located in the MechSE building next door—the Transportation Building still housed the now-defunct Department of Railway Engineering. In the IE Department, Phil worked with Dick Devor and L.C. Pigage, two of the original leaders of IE at UIUC.
Despite some differences in student life, most of Phil Ryan’s experiences may ring familiar to today’s students. He frequented a place called Kam’s (then on Daniels Street, next door to Dooleys, with a pizza place on the corner). And as an IE student, he learned engineering across disciplines, taking courses from the other major engineering departments. Ryan learned civil, mechanical, and industrial engineering—as well as problem-solving, math, and physics—and endured coursework that, later, would make the analytical part of his MBA pretty easy.
Upon graduation, Ryan worked for three years as a quality assurance engineer in the nuclear power industry. During that time, Phil got a call from a former fraternity brother who was working on Wall Street. “He said, ‘I think you should look into this—I think this is something you would really get a kick out of’”, Phil recalls. Intrigued, Phil went to New York City, after a stop in his home state to pick up his MBA from Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.
While at IU, Phil met his wife Elizabeth. As they resolved to become a family, they also resolved to spend some time working abroad. This stint became a 16-year odyssey in London, Zurich, and Montreal.
While managing their new, rewarding career, Phil and Elizabeth raised three kids abroad, graduating them from high schools in England and Switzerland.
For more than 23 years, Phillip held various positions with Credit Suisse, a global financial services Company domiciled in Switzerland.
He had a great time, and great timing: Ryan says, “I was there at the start of the twenty-year great bull market, and the start of the great deregulation of Wall Street… The growth was just explosive. And all kinds of things we talk about today—derivatives, swaps, merger and acquisition tactics, and parts of the capital markets (like high yield debt) didn’t exist when I started”
Phil attributes his skill at finance to his engineering background. He says, “A lot of the work is like engineering. It’s methodical, it’s data-based, it’s very pedagogical, very focused on problem solving…. I’ve always felt to this day that my engineering background was more important than my MBA…. [at IU]”.
When his position at Credit Suisse began to feel more like sales than engineering, Ryan made the move to become CFO, where he could use his ISE education again. “With a CFO, you’re back to engineering. It’s processes, people, problem-solving, organization, communication… I loved it.”
Before they retired to the U.S., Phil and Elizabeth moved from Europe to Canada. In Montreal, Ryan served as CFO of the Power Corporation of Canada from 2008-2012.
When he felt the time had come to stop working full time, Ryan built a portfolio of board and governance-related work and philanthropic activities. Ryan was elected Chairman of the Board of Directors of Swiss Re America Holding Corporation in October 2012. He also joined the Board of Directors of Swiss Re Ltd, the parent company of the Swiss Re Group, in April 2015, and is Chairman of the Finance and Risk Committee. Ryan was also an executive in residence at NYU Stern School of Business, and is a member of the Smithsonian National Board.
Here at Illinois, Phil is a member of the Campaign Cabinet. The Ryan fellowship in ISE, established in 2019, continues to assist multiple ISE graduate students. With the pandemic receding, Phil is pleased to finally be able to meet the fellowship recipients in person.
Above all, Phil is grateful. “I just feel exceptionally fortunate. Whether it’s Illinois, being around for the twenty-year bull market, or having married a fantastic woman and had three fantastic children. I’m just a very fortunate person, and Illinois is part of that.”
Thank you, Phil!