Ridhwan was born and raised in Singapore. He travelled to Perth in 2016 to pursue university education at UWA and graduated with a Bachelor of Science majoring in Psychology in 2018. Ridhwan subsequently completed a Master of Forensic Anthropology at UWA in 2020, and is currently enrolled as a PhD candidate at the Centre for Forensic Anthropology.

Current projects include examining the historical development of forensic anthropology in Indonesia, its structural organisation, and how casework involving skeletal material is managed. The efficacy of current anthropological standards on an Indonesian population are also of interest, with the goal of developing standards for estimating skeletal sex and age for a modern Indonesian population.