Ciaran is a native Marylander who earned his first BA in Theater, Film, and Media Studies at St Mary's College of Maryland in 2009. He subsequently moved to Spain and taught English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and worked as a voice actor and audio producer until 2019, when he decided to return to the US to pursue a career in language science research. He completed a new BA in Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) in 2022, while concurrently working as the UMD Magnetoencephalography (MEG) lab manager under Drs Jonathan Z Simon and Ellen Lau. 

He has begun graduate study as of 2024 in the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) program at UMD under Drs Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah and Samira Anderson in the Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP) department. He hopes to contribute to the field of language science research by studying the neural mechanisms underlying speech production, especially including how speech production is affected by aphasia.