Ryan Reid was first drawn to wireless communication in the pre-Internet 1980s, when he and his friends deployed walkie-talkies in their Hemet, Calif., neighborhood.

“They’d be in their house, I’d be in my house and we’d talk. It was just amazing to me,” said Reid, president of Boeing Satellite Systems and alumnus of the UC Riverside Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering (BCOE). There was a seed that was planted at that point that really got me interested in ‘How does this all work?’”

Today, Reid runs a unit of Boeing whose satellites serve more than 50 customers in 20 countries while supporting U.S. national defense, assisting global commerce, and connecting people in remote swaths of the world — linking people in ways that land-based cellular cannot.

“It’s about providing a ubiquitous ability to communicate,” said Reid, “leveraging space to connect people and businesses, and improving safety, security, and quality of life globally.”

This year, the electrical and electronics engineering alum will visit his alma mater as the first participant in the new BCOE Distinguished Visionary Program, created to support, mentor and inspire students by connecting them with leading innovators in the engineering industry.

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Twenty-seven years ago, Reid joined Boeing on the front lines, doing hard math and science before rising to lead engineering and project teams.

A milestone came in the early 2000s, when Boeing brought space-based communication to a region of the Middle East whose cellular network had been destroyed by the Iraq War.

It was groundbreaking at the time for satellites to play a pivotal role in wartime communications.

“All that video on the nightly news was coming in on a system that we created,” Reid said. “It’s those kinds of breakthroughs … it’s like ‘Wow, this is super-important,’ and it’s also something that people probably don’t think a lot about.”

Over the years, his project teams have repeated the cycle of learning and breakthrough, designing satellites that support not only wartime, emergency and remote-area communications, but also everyday needs ranging from national security to maps, weather, and other location-based tools that are now part of daily life.

In recent years, Reid’s team designed the O3b mPOWER satellite, which — unlike traditional satellites — is software-driven and thus re-programmable on the fly.

That means a satellite over the Americas can be moved to Asia — say, to provide internet service after a natural disaster — and reprogrammed remotely to correctly fit the Asian land mass: a previously impossible feat.

To date, 10 of the new satellites have been deployed to orbit about 5,000 miles above Earth, the first in 2022 and the ninth and tenth in July 2025.

“This technology allows you to reprogram customer to customer without changing anything about the hardware,” Reid said. “It’s like customizing an iPhone vs. building a new one every time … It’s the holy grail of communications payload.”

In July, the U.S. Space Force announced a $2.8 billion contract with Boeing to build advanced military communications satellites that leverage this innovative technology.

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To help his team develop the formidable O3b mPOWER satellite, Reid borrowed a grade-school concept from his walkie-talkie days.

“I created a sandbox,” he said, “where it was OK for cross-functional, cross-disciplinary teams to experiment, prototype, break things, and learn from that as quickly as possible while staying directionally aligned to a final outcome.”

In effect, he furnished a safe space for strategic failure. His forte, after all, is systems engineering — ensuring big-picture operational success by envisioning multiple scenarios, weighing risks, trade-offs and sacrifices, and choosing a series of moves that set up achievement in the future.

In many ways, systems thinking transcends the technical, Reid added: “It's valuable in negotiations, business deals, and leading people and organizations.”

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Reid’s knack for systems thinking dates to his boyhood.

“I often took things apart,” he said, “even if I sometimes didn’t know how to put them back together again.” (One example: a blue BMX bicycle, to his dad’s dismay.)

At what age did this start? “Probably as soon as I could reach a toolbox.”

Math and science, along with curiosity, came easily. Meanwhile, his father, Don, taught him resilience and hard work while his maternal grandfather, Bobby – a largely self-taught electrical engineer – modeled passion for craft.

By the time he reached high school, Reid was busy rebuilding a 1966 Ford Mustang convertible, in Tahoe Turquoise with a white top, which he’d inherited from his grandfather.

“So at that point,” he smiled, “I was putting things back together.”

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After graduating from Hemet High School, he drove to UC Riverside, the first in his family to attend college.

He said that at BCOE, he valued the small class sizes, personalized instruction, and proximity to home.

“Having the one-on-one personal attention and support from the professors was invaluable,” Reid said. “I was concerned going to grad school that I wouldn’t be as prepared as students coming from larger, more established institutions like Stanford, MIT, etc. I found the opposite … In many ways, I was more prepared.”

BCOE, he added, “set me up really well.”

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By serving a year in the Distinguished Visionary Program, Reid will return the favor, through such channels as student round tables, coordination with faculty on curricula, and lectures, chats and meals with student ambassadors.

His advice for an aspiring engineer? 

“Be humble, curious, and relentless. … discover — and keep discovering — what brings you joy, what energizes you. For me that was, and continues to be, leading teams of people to solve hard problems that have a real impact on the world.”

Header image: Portrait of Ryan Reid, president of Boeing Satellite Systems and Bourns College of Engineering alum who will serve as the college's inaugural Distinguished Visionary. (Photo credit: Paul Pinner)