After leaving the military, Ryan Schalles wondered what his service had accomplished. He served four years in the Marines, including a deployment to Afghanistan, and said the service felt abstract to him. Schalles enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2011, and his bio lists his service as a corporal from 2011 to 2015.
Schalles is now an assistant professor at UNT Health Fort Worth. He is founding faculty at the UNT Health College of Nursing and a clinical administrator at the Texas Center for Patient Safety. In that role, he studies what happens to veterans after they leave the military and teaches health workers how to better care for former service members. His bio also lists service as a first lieutenant in the Army Reserves Nurse Corps from 2020 to 2024.
Schalles said he can now see the effect of his work. "I can see the impact that I'm making in people's lives," he said. He grew up in Lubbock and said he felt lost as a young man, with no good relationship with his father and no role model. He said he wanted to prove he could do something hard.