The O'Hern group in the Summer 2010: (back row from left to right) Carl Schreck, Thibault Bertrand, Robert Hoy, and Mark Shattuck;
(front row from left to right) Tianqi Shen, Alice Zhou, Corey O'Hern, Sarah Penrose, Amy Werner-Allen, S. S. Ashwin, and Guo-Jie Gao.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Corey S. O'Hern
Corey is an associate professor in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Physics at Yale. Before joining the faculty at Yale, he was a postdoctoral fellow working with Prof. Andrea Liu (UPenn, Physics) who was then at UCLA and Prof. Sidney Nagel (UChicago, Physics) on computational studies of jamming transitions in frictionless granular materials and glass transitions in model glass-forming liquids. Corey recieved his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999; his dissertation focused on developing elasticity theories for liquid crystalline systems with biological importance such as DNA-cationic lipid complexes. See his Ph.D. thesis. Corey was an undergraduate at Duke University and graduated in 1994 with a B.S. in Physics. He likes to point out that while at Duke, he performed experimental research on granular materials in Bob Behringer's Lab and to his knowlege did not break anything! His CV is available here.
VISITING SCIENTISTS
Mark D. Shattuck
Mark is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Benjamin Levich Institute at the City College of New York (CCNY). Before joining the faculty at CCNY, Mark was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics and Center for Nonlinear Dynamics at the University of Texas at Austin working with Prof. Harry Swinney on vibrated granular media. Mark earned his Ph.D. in 1995 from Duke University while working with Prof. Robert Behringer on "Flows in Porous Media: Visualization by Magnetic Resonance Imaging". (Mark and Corey overlapped for four years at Duke.) Mark spent part of his sabatical at Yale in 2007 and has continued to visit Yale once a week since then. Mark and Corey have a number of ongoing research projects including the development of statistical mechanics descriptions of granular materials that include hard-particle constraints, friction, and non-spherical particle shapes.
POSTDOCS
S.S. Ashwin
Aswhin arrived as a postdoc in the Fall 2009, and is jointly advised by Profs. Jerzy Blawzdziewicz, Corey O'Hern, and Mark Shattuck. He received his Ph.D. from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India in 2006. His dissertation was entitled "Topics in Dynamics, Thermodynamics and Electronic Structure of Supercooled Liquids" under the supervision of Prof. Srikanth Sastry. Prior to joining the O'Hern group, he was a postdoc with Prof. Richard Bowles in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Saskatchewan. Ashwin has the longest name in the group, Ashwin Selvarajan Sampangiraj, and is extremely adept at calculating partition functions. Ashwin is currently working statistical mechanics descriptions of hard-particle systems using analytical and computational techniques.
Robert HoyRob joined the group as a postdoc in the Fall 2009. Prior to that, he was a postdoc in the group of Prof. Glenn Fredrickson in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Rob received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2007 from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation was entitled "Effect of Entanglements on Mechanical Properties of Glassy Polymers" under the supervision of Prof. Mark Robbins. Rob is an expert on polymer simulations and statistical mechanics. He is currently studying sticky-sphere models to better understand the collapse and folding of single polymers and proteins.
Vijay joined the group as a postdoc in the Fall 2010. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the Centre for Condensed Matter Theory at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore working with Prof. Sriram Ramaswamy. His Ph.D. focused on the nonequilibrium statistical mechanics of active and granular media. Vijay's work at Yale will investigate energy transport in granular media with an emphasis on the effects of penetrators and their trajectories..
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Thibault Bertrand
Thibault earned his B.S. in Physics from Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) Cachan and is now a first year Master's student there. He is performing his five month research internship at Yale SEAS from April through September 2010. He will begin a joint Ph.D. program between Yale and ENS in September, 2011. He will have two Ph.D. advisors, Prof. O'Hern from Yale and Prof. Eric Clement from University Pierre et Marie Curie, and will earn two PhDs, one from France and one from the US. He will work on both simulations and experiments of granular media to investigate vibrational modes and energy transport in these systems.
Prasanta is a 7th year graduate student in Applied Physics and is expected to receive his Ph.D. in the Spring 2011. He earned his B.S. and M. S. degrees in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur in 2002 and 2003, respectively. He is using both analytical and computational methods to understand glassy dynamics in dense colloidal suspensions using quasi-one-dimensional continuum models.
Carl is a 5th year graduate student in the Physics Department. He received his B.S. in physics from Bethel University (in Minnesota) in 2006, where his father is anthropology professor. He is currently studying jamming in granular systems composed of ellipsoidal and other nonspherical particles. Carl is an expert on molecular dynamics, dissipative dynamics, and energy minimization simulations of particulate systems undergoing isotropic compression and applied shear.
Tianqi is a 3rd year graduate student in the Physics Department. He received his B. S. in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China. Tianqi is a part of the Integrated Graduate Program in Physical and Engineering Biology. He is currently developing coarse-grained simulations to study TPR protein gels in collaboration with Prof. Lynne Regan's group in the Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry.
Alice is a second year graduate student in the Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry (MB&B). She received her B.S. in Life Sciences from Fudan University in China. Alice is currently using atomistic models to predict the binding affinity of peptides and TPR proteins. One of her thesis projects will focus on understanding how packing and bond constraints affect the structure and dynamics of proteins and protein-protein interactions. She is co-advised by Prof. Lynne Regan from MB&B and Prof. O'Hern.
FORMER STUDENTS & POSTDOCS
POSTDOCS
Dr. Gregg Lois was a postdoc in the O'Hern group from 2006 to 2009. He is now a research scientist at Arete Associates.
PH.D. STUDENTS
Ning Xu is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Science and Technology of China.
Guo-Jie Gao, a former Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, graduated in August, 2009. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Theoretical and computational studies of small jammed systems." Guo-Jie is a postdoc in the Department of Mechanical Science and Bioengineering at Osaka University working on bulk nanostructured metals.
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UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Matthew Barber (Physics, Yale College, 2009)
Erik Brown (Physics, Yale College 2006)
Matthew Kremer (Applied Physics, Yale College 2011)
Sarah Penrose (Chemistry, Connecticut College, 2013)
Ian Rose (Physics, Yale College, 2009)
Ajay Shalwala (Chemical Engineering, Yale College 2005)
Rebecca Taft (Physics, Yale College, 2008)
Phillippa Thomson (Mechanical Engineering, Yale College 2006)
Michael Weiner (Physics, Yale College, 2011)
Amy Werner-Allen (Applied Math, Yale College, 2011)
Alix Witthoft (Physics, Mount Holyoke College, 2007)
Christopher Yerino (Physics, Yale College 2006)