From his youthful days in the 1980s, living where Noble Avenue intersects 174th in the Southeast Bronx, N.Y.C., Ryan, a Jamaican immigrant, was a big fan of all types of urban creativity and rhythm-spoken words. In his diverse community, hip-hop was born, and boys and girls aspired to be breakdancers, graffiti artists, deejays, or emcees.

What sparked his interest in computer science were the words of a speech given by Orenthal Hawkins, a Fordham University computer science graduate who later would become Ryan's mentor. Hawkins' vivid, day-in-the-life description of his job as a computer programmer and the possibilities in the field were like music in Ryan's ears.

"It sounded like the greatest thing I'd ever heard," Ryan says.

Under Hawkins' guidance, Ryan got accepted into a program called INROADS/NYC, which allowed him to intern at Chemical Bank's (now Chase Manhattan's) information technology department during his first years of college, and write code for the initialization program at Lockheed Martin's Small Bundle Parcel Sorter in Owego, N.Y.

Ryan graduated from Binghamton University with a B.Sc. in computer science in 1998, and followed it with a master's degree in systems engineering from George Mason University in 2000, while working 30 hours a week as an IBM automation specialist and adjunct faculty member at GMU.

He became an analyst in the research and development department at Metron Aviation the same year he received his master's, and started a Ph.D. program in information technology. By then, Ryan had introduced a couple of classes into GMU's curriculum: Internet literacy and multimedia research. It wasn't long before he'd convinced the university's administrators of the convergence of two new fields: multimedia and hip-hop. The common denominators? Heavy writing emphasis, group projects, and they're both "real world," Ryan says. "It makes students feel what they say means something. They're adding onto what the literature is."

Whether writing papers on engineering, literature, or hip-hop, Ryan says he took the same approach.

"I take the same type of notes," he reasons, "when I read a systems engineering book and when I read Richard Wright or Kevin Powell. I was using the same tools. I guess nobody had thought to take it a step further or bring it into the classroom."

Ryan won awards for Best Science and Engineering paper from the National Black Graduate Student Association at GMU two years in a row. His 2001 award came on the heels of a paper he wrote on Tupac Shakur in Doula: The Journal of Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture.

Ryan's hip-hop course, which started as a one-credit pilot last spring, became so popular with the first group of students that it was graduated to a four-credit elective last fall. This semester, the number of students at the majority-white institution who tried to enroll for the course exceeded the limit of 28.

Although the genre got its start in Black America, more than 70 percent of hip-hop albums now are purchased by Whites, according to a 2002 paper entitled "Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth through Engaging Hip-hop Culture," published by the National Council of Teachers of English. But Ryan says hip-hop has become more about money than anything else.

"With the way hip-hop is marketed, it means songs that might have a meaningful message [about] AIDS, murder, and unemployment statistics in Northeast Washington, D.C., don't make for a good video or have an appealing hook."

So, now that hip-hop has moved from street corners to multimillion-dollar corporations, have the Internet and online magazines become the new sources for "real" or "pure" hip-hop?

The Internet offers freedom of expression, Ryan says. "You can put out what you like, [whereas] Lorenzo 'Ice Tea' Thomas on 93.9 WKYS [in D.C.] says he has little control over his play list."

Hip-hop artists such as AntiPop Consortium -- a group lauded for their interest in technology and in new ways to use it in creating music -- are where hip-hop has always been, Ryan says.

"If you look at the sampling and Grand Master Flash...with invention of the cross-fader, a device that allows you to go back between two turntables, and the cue, which allows you to listen to one song on speakers and another song on headphones, this is something an 18-year-old achieved in the Bronx. "Technology," Ryan says, "was there from the beginning.

"In the early '80s, people were taking pieces of pure jazz of Miles Davis, of John Coltrane, [to] incorporate those via loop into their music. Dr Dre didn't go to school to learn what they're doing; they were plugging into a lamp pole to get electricity. As hip-hop has matured, they might take a sample from 'Good Times' by Chic and make that into 'Rapper's Delight' [and] loop it 30 or 40 times. But now you might have three, four, or five samples playing on top of each other to make a beat, and to the untrained listener, it sounds like one beat. It takes a certain kind of expertise to blend...."

Ryan says music software like Cubase, Acid Pro, and Cool Edit puts anyone with a certain amount of computer expertise in the same league as most producers.

"It allows you to be a producer without having a studio or even leave your house," Ryan says. "If you start out with a drum then add a bass and a sample you might have taken from a video game you have in MP3 form,...you can build a beat the same way as Dr Dre, the Neptunes, or Primo. And then you add the effect of the Internet, where you can take the beat and upload it to an emcee who may rhyme over it. And now you have a song with minimal expense."

Born in 1976, the year rap began to emerge, Ryan has grown up with the music. Hip-hop is where he has lived, the music he's listened to, and the traditions, language, and fashion that have shaped him. Ryan, who hopes to complete his Ph.D. in information technology in 2005, is taking his knowledge beyond the classroom, by giving workshops, lectures, and speeches on hip-hop culture ( http://www.metahiphop.com ). He is one of the few researchers poised to engage hip-hop not just as a mode of entertainment but as a medium of communication that impacts, represents, and misrepresents the life expectations of youth, especially inner-city youth, in the U.S.