Ryan Sangbaek Kim is the founding director and principal investigator of the Ryan Research Institute (RRI), an independent institute based in Paris. Working across affective neuroscience, theoretical psychology, philosophy of mind, AI ethics, and law, he has developed a sustained interdisciplinary research program on the interpretation, suppression, and governance of emotion in human and machine systems.

He is best known for introducing Affective Sovereignty, a socio-technical design right that locates the person as the final interpreter of his or her own emotional life under conditions of computational mediation. His broader body of work includes the concepts of Affective Suppression Fatigue (ASF), Algorithmic Affective Blunting (AAB), and Predictive Emotional Self-Modeling (PESAM), through which he integrates computational formalism, phenomenological inquiry, and regulatory thought.

His work moves across academic research, public writing, and emotion-centered design, guided by the view that scholarship, culture, and technological form are not separate domains but continuous sites of interpretation.