His research interests include visual analytics; 3D multimodal interaction; bioinformatics visualization; virtual environments; visual reasoning; and interactive visualization of large-scale information spaces. Formerly, he was the Associate Director for External Relations of the Georgia Tech GVU Center. Dr. Ribarsky is the former Chair and a current Director of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee. He is also a member of the Steering Committees for the IEEE Visualization Conference and the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference, the leading international conferences in their fields. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and is currently an Editorial Board member of IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications. Dr. Ribarsky co-founded the Eurographics/IEEE visualization conference series (now called EG/IEEE EuroVis) and led the effort to establish the Virtual Reality Conference series. For the above efforts on behalf of IEEE, Dr. Ribarsky won the IEEE Meritorious Service Award in 2004. In 2007, he was general co-chair of the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Symposium.

Dr. Ribarsky has published over 130 scholarly papers, book chapters, and books. He has received competitive research grants and contracts from NSF, ARL, ARO, DHS, EPA, ONR, AFOSR, DARPA, NASA, NIMA, NIJ, U.S. DOT, and several companies.