Headshot of Corey O'Hern

Corey O'Hern

Professor; Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, Physics, Applied Physics and Graduate Program in Computational Biology & Bioinformatics
Research Interests: Statistical mechanics of nonequilibrium systems; glass and jamming transitions in soft matter; computational biology; protein structure, interactions, and design.

PEB Students

  • Sam Banks

    Physics (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: Modeling tissue mechanics during development
  • Naomi Brandt

    Physics (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: Computational biophysics with a focus in molecular dynamics and modeling
  • Dr. Diego Caballero

    Physics (O'Hern & Regan Labs)
    Thesis title: “Computational studies of protein structure”
  • Alex Calabrese

    Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: I am interested in computational modeling of proteins, particularly structural response to amino acid mutations.
  • Dr. Yuxuan Cheng

    Physics (O'Hern Lab)
    Thesis Title: Computational Studies of Deformable Particles Flowing Through Constrictions
  • Andres Cordoba

    Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: Protein-Protein Interaction, Biological Networks, Machine Learning
  • Carlos del Valle Urberuaga

    Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: My research focuses on studying and engineering programmable active matter—systems of programmable agents that replicate the collaborative behaviors observed in biological systems. By leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning, I aim to design agents that self-organize into materials with desired properties or mimic biological phenomena.
  • Devon Finlay

    Physics (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: Computational studies of the biophysical properties of proteins
  • Dr. Jennifer Gaines

    Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (O'Hern & Regan Labs)
    Thesis title: “Computational studies of protein structure”
  • Gautham Gopinath

    Physics (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: Spreading dynamics of cell aggregates
  • Dr. Alex Grigas

    Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (O'Hern Lab)
    Thesis title: “Investigating the Connection Between Protein Folding, Polymer Collapse and Jamming”
  • Baichuan He

    Physics (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: Deformable particle model, soft matter
  • Zhuoyi Liu

    Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: Computational modeling of proteins
  • Arthur MacKeith

    Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: I am interested in soft matter, biophysics, and emergent phenomena.
  • Marshall McCraw

    Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: Effects of particle geometry on glass transition
  • Dr. Zhe Mei

    Chemistry (O'Hern)
    Thesis title: “Computational Studies of Proteins: Void analyses, NMR and X-ray structures, Fluctuations in protein structure measured using molecular dynamics simulations”
  • Dr. Grace Meng

    Chemistry (O'Hern)
    Thesis title: “Computational Studies of Protein-Protein Interfaces and Docking”
  • Emmanuel Mintah

    Biomedical Engineering (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: I’m interested in the computational modeling of the geometry and mechanics of cellular processes, most notably cell division.
  • Jake Sumner

    Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: I am interested in computationally modeling protein-protein interactions and assessing their quality to create robust scoring functions with deep-learning techniques.
  • Andrew Ton

    Physics (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: Computational models of tissue development and repair
  • Dr. John (Jack) Treado

    Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (O'Hern Lab)
    Thesis title: “Computational Studies of Packing and Jamming in Biological Systems”
  • Dr. Kyle Vanderwerf

    Physics (O'Hern Lab)
    Thesis title: “Geometry and contact mechanics of athermal jammed packings of frictionless spherical and nonspherical particles”
  • Dr. Alejandro Virrueta

    Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (O'Hern and Regan Labs)
    Thesis title: “Predicting side chain dihedral angles of protein cores and beyond: An exploration of the limits of the hard-sphere model”
  • Dr. Peter Williams

    Applied Physics (O'Hern Lab)
  • Annie Xia

    Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: Disorder and amorphous structures, granular matter, nonlinear systems
  • Yitong Zheng

    Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (O'Hern Lab)
    Research Interests: I’m interested in understanding the behavior of biological systems with computational models.