Ryan Dickerhoff is a freelance engineer in the Pittsburgh, PA area. He is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz with a Bachelors of Science in Robotics Engineering. Ryan is inspired to push for performance and quality as well as to find creative and beautiful solutions for today’s hardest challenges. He loves building things to help people and is excited to innovate to create an exciting future.

Ryan grew up in Berkeley California with his sister Erin and parents Darryl and Diane.

Ryan attended college at UCSC as a Kresge College affiliate in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering. He studied Robotics Engineering and worked on various projects including his senior design project ElbowQuad where he led the mechanical design of a unique quadcopter with friends and classmates Trieste, Kevin, and Aidan. ElbowQuad is a unique quadcopter designed for FFF 3D printing and programmed with several interesting flight modes. He co-authored a paper on the project which was presented at the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics SciTech Conference in January 2018.

Ryan worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for three summers during college on various projects including: FLEXLAB: a building energy use testing facility, where he configured test chambers installing sensors and experiments, data acquisition systems, and programming tools to organize sensor naming and basic data visualization.

Ryan also developed prototypes for electrode manufacturing to develop low-cost brackish water deionization technology with coworkers at LIGTT and LBNL. Ultimately the use case is for low cost deionization devices that produce drinking water from brine.

Ryan worked on MoWiTT: a building envelope test facility which consists of a mobile calorimeter to measure heat flow through exchangeable test items, usually windows and shading systems. He modified a water valve to be controlled by a stepper motor and an arduino with code to calibrate, detect and recover from faults, and adjust valve position via voltage input from an external PID controller.

In 2017 Ryan spent the summer as an intern at SSL (now Maxar Space Infrastructure) working in the Environmental test equipment group. He reconfigured thermal-vacuum chambers for experiments and equipment bake-outs, and wired electrical improvements to the chambers.

After graduating UCSC in 2018, Ryan took a position at Maxar as a Manufacturing engineer building high performance space systems. He directed the day to day tasks of technicians building large communications satellites, participated in customer meetings, and helped design next generation flight hardware. He flexed his 3D printing muscles by designing manufacturing shop aids and tooling as well as new concepts for future spacecraft hardware. He improved on previous designs and integrated new techniques to create equipment to protect sensitive flight hardware.

In August 2019 Ryan and his then fiancé Eliana, packed up and drove across the country on a road trip ending in Pittsburgh, PA. On the way they saw the Grand Canyon, where they heard talks by Eliana’s friends and fellow park rangers. They camped and moteled their way through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, to Nashville Tennessee where they stayed with Ryan’s best friend Andrew, before completing the final leg to Pittsburgh.

In early 2020 Ryan took on a couple of contract engineering jobs through Upwork, working on product prototypes and industrial robotics. In June, Ryan and Eliana Kille were married in a private, intimate, ceremony after canceling their California Wedding plans due to pandemic.

Ryan loves to spend his free time outdoors skiing, hiking, camping, canoeing with the dog, and quality time indoors playing games, cooking, tinkering in the workshop, and hanging out with the cat.