In Memory of Ryan Patrick Wallace

This GoFundMe is for the family of Ryan Patrick Wallace, a victim of the Bastrop truck-bus accident on March 22 outside of Austin in Hay County, Texas. Ryan, originally from La Verne, California, was a program manager at Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center. He was also on track to receive his doctoral degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Ryan graduated from the University of California, Irvine (B.S.) and California State University, San Marcos (M.S.).

Ryan’s family will receive and manage all the funds raised on this page; his mother and sister are directly being contacted and updated. The funds will help ease their financial burdens resulting from this unimaginable loss and to honor Ryan’s memory. Before the accident, Ryan had finally found a rhythm and was genuinely feeling very happy and thankful for the life that he worked so hard to build.

Ryan was a dedicated grandson, son, brother, and uncle, sparing no efforts to make sure that everyone felt loved, prioritized, and cared for. Ryan was a wonderful friend and colleague who always lent a helping hand. “It’s no trouble at all,” he always said with a charming smile.

Ryan excelled in his professional and scholarly work. He worked with great enthusiasm at his role at Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center, dedicated to securing resources for cancer research and education, with a mission to make cancer knowledge, prevention, and treatments more readily available in the country’s most diverse region. Ryan demonstrated a true talent for conveying difficult scientific material to audiences of various backgrounds, which is much needed in medicine. Through his hard work, intelligence, strategic thinking, team spirit, and leadership, he made inspiring contributions to advance the Cancer Center’s goals to reduce the nation’s cancer burden with novel technologies and capabilities.

A former president of the Journalism Graduate Student Council at UT Austin, Ryan was generous with his time and knowledge, working with multiple research groups and helping incoming students adjust to academic life. He designed, launched, and taught a multimedia reporting course in science communication, the first of its kind at UT Austin. In addition to his published work on science communication, Ryan’s research centered on improving representation of Latinx/Hispanic communities in academic writing.

Ryan was just cleared to finally defend his dissertation on April 8, 2024 after years of sacrifice to complete his Ph.D. amidst deaths of loved ones, bouts of illness, and working several jobs to keep himself and his beloved pups fed and housed in the place that he was so proud to call home.

Ryan loved finding and documenting natural beauty–like the snow-capped mountains around his California home, and the wildflowers around Texas in the spring. His passion for life will live on through all the people that he influenced.