Ryan Sangbaek Kim is the founding director and principal investigator of the Ryan Research Institute (RRI), an independent research institute based in Paris. His work spans affective neuroscience, psychoanalytic theory, philosophy of mind, AI ethics, and law, organized around a long-term research program on how emotions are interpreted, suppressed, and governed — by individuals, by institutions, and by machines.

His recent research introduces Affective Sovereignty as a socio-technical design right for emotion AI systems, alongside formal models of affective suppression fatigue (ASF), algorithmic affective blunting (AAB), and predictive emotional self-modeling (PESAM). These frameworks bridge computational formalism, phenomenological inquiry, and regulatory design.

Beyond academic publishing, he composes music, writes for public audiences, and develops emotion-informed applications — treating scholarship, art, and design as a single continuum. He holds interdisciplinary expertise across psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and law..