Gerard Ryle is the director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 2011. He led the worldwide teams of journalists working on the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations, the biggest in journalism history.

His work as a journalist began in his native Ireland, and he spent more than 20 years working as an investigative reporter and editor in Australia. He was later a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan, and in 2013 he accepted an honorary doctorate from the University of Liege, on behalf of ICIJ.