PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
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Corey S. O'Hern
Corey is a Full Professor in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, Applied Physics, and Physics and Graduate Program in Computational Biology & Bioinformatics 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 a Full 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. |
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ASSOCIATE RESEARCH SCIENTISTS & POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATES
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Weiwei Jin
Weiwei Jin is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Yale. He earned his Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics from Peking University in 2018. During his Ph.D., his research focused on computational studies of crystalization and jamming in static packings of nonspherical particles. He obtained his B.S. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Peking University in 2012. At Yale, he will carry out computational studies of bulk metallic glasses, jamming of deformable particles, such as cells and tissues, and jamming in granular media. |
Dong Wang
Dong Wang is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Yale. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics in 2018 from Duke University working with Prof. Robert Behringer. His Ph.D. focused on the experimental studies of the response of granular materials to applied shear using photoelastic particles. He earned his B.S. in Applied Physics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2012. At Yale, he will carry out computational studies of cell migration on soft substrates in collaboration with Prof. Michael Murrell. |
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GRADUATE STUDENTS
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Marshall McCraw
Marshall joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science in 2023. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from George Washington University, where he worked with Prof. Santiago Solares on lubricated contact mechanics for atomic force microscopy measurements of biological materials. His current research focuses on studying the properties of glasses using the deformable particle model. |
Gautham Gopinath
Gautham is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics and joined Yale in 2022. He earned his BSc in Engineering Physics from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he studied the glass transition in polydisperse systems with Dr. Chi Hang Lam. In his free time, he likes to play all kinds of sports (soccer, badminton, ping pong), read books, and play the guitar. He now studies surface tension-driven flows in cell aggregates and the universal shape properties of confluent cell monolayers using the deformable particle model. |
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Naomi Brandt
Naomi Brandt is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics at Yale. She started at Yale in 2021 and joined the O'Hern group in 2022. She graduated with a B.A. in Physics from Mount Holyoke College, where she studied acoustic speckle in ultrasound imaging under Dr. Theresa Herd. After graduating from Mount Holyoke, she spent two years working as a research assistant at the University at Albany under Professor Alan Chen, using molecular dynamics simulations to study RNA conformational changes. She is currently interested in using computational methods to predict protein-protein interactions. |
Shivnag Sista
Shivnag joined the Department of Physics at Yale in 2020 and the O’Hern group in 2022. He earned his B.S. degree in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science, where he studied the dynamics of singlet fission in organic chromophores under the supervision of Dr. Jayashree Nagesh. His current research focuses on understanding the individual and collective behavior of emulsion droplets using deformable particle model simulations. |
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Zhuoyi Liu
Zhuoyi (Joey) Liu is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from Tsinghua University in 2021, where he worked with Prof. Haipeng Gong to develop enhanced sampling methods in molecular dynamics simulations. He is now interested in computational modelling of proteins using atomistic molecular dynamics simulations, and his current research focuses on FRET-assisted structural modelling. |
Arthur MacKeith
Arthur joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale in 2021 and the O'Hern reserach group in the spring of 2022. He earned his B.A. degree in Physics and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago where he worked with Professor Heinrich Jaeger on structural analyses of three dimensional granular packings. Before joining Yale, he also worked on robotics as a research engineer at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. His research interests include living and non-living active matter. His current research focuses on the mechanics of developing mesophyll tissue in leaves. |
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Evan Willmarth
Evan is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University. He attended Lehigh University, where he earned a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering. During his undergraduate studies, he contributed to Prof. Erdogan Madenci's reserach on advancing the peridynamic differential operator. He is currently interested in the mechanics of granular materials and metallic glasses, as well as peridynamics. |
Emmanuel Mintah
Emmanuel is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Integrated Program in Physical and Engineering Biology at Yale, and joined the O'Hern Group in 2022. He went to Princeton University and earned a B.S.E. degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering. At Princeton, he was introduced to scientific research by Prof. Sujit S. Datta and continued in research in Prof. Howard A. Stone's Complex Fluids Group. He is now studying breast cancer invasion through adipose tissue using theoretical and computational methods. In particular, he is modeling this process by carrying out simulations of the invasion of active deformable particles into a disordered array of stiff obstacles. |
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Annie Xia
Annie is a second year Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and the Integrated Graduate Program in Physical and Engineering Biology at Yale. She studied physics and math at the University of Chicago, where she did experiments in Prof. Heinrich Jaeger's group on acoustically levitated granular clusters. She is currently interested in exploring the mechanical properties of granular metamaterials. |
Yitong Zheng
Yitong is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Integrated Graduate Program in Physics and Engineering Biology at Yale and joined Prof. Corey O'Hern's group in the fall of 2021. He received his B.S. degree in physics from Wuhan University, where he performed computational studies of polyelectrolytes with Prof. Zhijie Tan. In the fall of 2019, Yitong was an exchange student at Duke University, where he carried out computational studies of polymer dynamics with Prof. Michael Rubinstein. His current research project focuses on how tissue mechanics affects the dynamics of tumor cell invasion. |
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Jake Sumner
Jake is a second year Ph.D. student in the Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Yale, who joined the O'Hern Group in 2022. He went to Duke University for his undergraduate studies, where he earned a B.S. in Biology and minors in Computer Science and German. After he graduated in 2019, he went to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he worked with Dr. Hugh O'Neill and Dr. Shuo Qian on developing ab initio reconstruction software for protein data collected via small angle neutron scattering. He is now using molecular dynamics simulations (over a range of scales from coarse-grained to all-atom) to understand the biophysical properties of proteins. |
Jinpeng Fan
Jinpeng is a fourth year Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University. He earned his B.A. in Mathematics and Physics and M.A. in Physics from Wesleyan University. At Wesleyan, he worked with Prof. Francis Starr on computational studies of glass formation and dynamical heterogeneity in star polymers. His current research focuses on determining the key features that control the glass-forming ability of bulk metallic glasses. |
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FORMER RESEARCH SCIENTISTS, POSTDOCS, STUDENTS & VARs
RESEARCH SCIENTISTS & POSTDOCS
Dr. Jack Logan, 2022-2024.
Dr. Francesco Arceri, 2021-2024. Francesco is currently a Research Fellow in INFN Sezione di Padova in Padova, Italy.
Dr. Yuan-Chao Hu, 2018-2019 and 2021-2022. Yuan-Chao is currently a data scientist at Astreya Partners, Inc. in San Jose, CA.
Dr. Arman Boromand, 2016-2019. Arman is a materials scientist at Facebook's Reality Lab in Redmond, WA.
Dr. Sandra Acebes Serrano, 2017-2018. Sandra is currently a big data consultant at Stratesys in Madrid, Spain.
Dr. Abe Clark, 2014-2017. Abe is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA.
Dr. Bhaskar Sen Gupta, 2015 to 2016. He is now a postdoctoral research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany.
Dr. Kai Zhang, 2012 to 2015. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Duke Kunshan University.
Dr. Stefanos Papanikolaou, 2011 to 2013. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at West Virginia University.
Dr. Robert Hoy, 2009 to 2012. He is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of South Florida.
Dr. S. S. Ashwin, 2009 to 2012. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computational Science and Engineering at Nagoya University, Japan.
Dr. Maria Sammalkorpi, 2010 to 2011. She is now an Academy Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Aalto University, Finland.
Dr. Gregg Lois, 2006 to 2009. He is now a research scientist at Arete Associates.
Ph.D. STUDENTS
Andrew Ton received a Ph.D. in Physics in December, 2024. Andrew's thesis was entitled "Computational Studies of Tissue Development and Repair". Andrew is now a data scientist at Evernorth Health Services in Morris Plains, NJ.
Yuxuan Cheng received a Ph.D. in Physics in December, 2024. Yuxuan's thesis was entitled "Computational Studies of Deformable Particles Flowing Through Constrictions". Yuxuan is now a quantitative researcher at Virtu Financial in New York City, NY.
Luka Maisuradze received a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry in May, 2024. Luka's thesis was entitled "The Elucidation of Chromatin Structural Properties Through Feature Detection in Hi-C Maps". Luka is now a postdoctoral associate at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD.
Alex Grigas received a Ph.D. in Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics in May, 2024. Alex's thesis was entitled "Investigating the Connection Between Protein Folding, Polymer Collapse and Jamming". Alex is now a postdoctoral associate at Syracuse University in Syracuse, NY.
Aya Nawano received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science in May, 2023. Aya's thesis was entitled "Computational Studies of the Mechanical Properties of Metallic Glasses". Aya is now a computational research support analyst at Yale's Center for Research Computing in New Haven, CT.
Jerry Zhang received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science in December, 2022. Jerry's thesis was entitled "Computational Studies of the Mechanical Properties of Granular Packings and Granular Metamaterials". Jerry is now a quantitative research associate at JP Morgan Chase in New York City, NY.
John (Jack) Treado received a Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Science in May, 2022. Jack's thesis was entiteld "Computational Studies of Packing and Jamming in Biological Systems". Jack is now a postdoctoral associate at the Max Plank Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany.
Philip Wang received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science in May, 2021. Philip's thesis was entitled "Computational Studies of the protocol-dependent mechanical properties of granular materials." Philip is now a software engineer for Siemens Industry Software, Inc. in Fremont, CA.
Zhe Mei received a Ph.D. in Chemistry in May, 2021. Zhe's thesis was entitled "Computational studies of proteins: Void analyses, NMR and x-ray crystal structures, and molecular dynamics simulations." Zhe is now a scientific software developer in the protein modeling team at OpenEye Scientific Software in Sante Fe, NM.
Kyle VanderWerf received a Ph.D. in Physics in May, 2020. Kyle's thesis was entitled "Geometry of Contact Mechanics of Athermal Jammed Packings of Frictionless Spherical and Nonspherical Particles." Kyle is now working at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in the Advanced RF Techniques group.
Qikai Wu received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science in December, 2019. Qikai's thesis was entitled "Computational Studies of Granular Materials at Finite Temperatures". Qikai will become a Data Engineer at Reddit, Inc in San Francisco, CA.
Meng Fan received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science in December, 2019. Meng's thesis was entitled "Computational Studies of the Mechanical Behavior of Metallic Glasses". Meng will become a Software Engineer at Uber ATG in San Francisco, CA.
Alexandra "Lexi" Signoriello received a Ph.D. in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in December, 2018. Lexi's Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Computational modeling of immune cells during tumor development using the deformable particle model." Lexi is currently a research scientist at NYU Langone Hospital.
Jennifer (Gaines) Mortensen received a Ph.D. in Computational Biology & Bioinformatics in May, 2018. Jennifer's Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Computational Studies of Protein Structure". Jennifer is currently a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Chemistry at Tufts University.
JC Salevan received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science in December, 2017. JC's Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Experiments in Hydrodynamic Sediment Transport: Precision Measurements of Erosion in a Turbulent Fluid Flow". JC is currently a data analyst at Yale's Office for Institutional Research.
Alejandro Virrueta received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science in December, 2017. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Predicting side-chain dihedral angles of protein cores and beyond: An exploration of the limits of the hard-sphere model". He is currently working as a software engineer at Airbnb.
Minglei Wang received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science in December, 2017. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Computational Studies of Bulk Metallic Glasses: Asymmetric Crystallization, Nano-scale Crystallization, and Ductility". He is currently a strategist at Goldman Sachs.
Thibault Bertrand received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science in May, 2016. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Shaking the Sandbox: Energy Transport, Shear Jamming and Protocol Dependence in Model Jammed Solids". He is currently a Strategic Teaching Fellow in Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London, UK.
Diego Caballero received his Ph.D. in Physics in May, 2016. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Computational Studies of Protein Structure". He is currently a financial risk expert at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany.
Manuel Mai received his Ph.D. in Physics in May, 2016. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Outcome Prediction and Reconstruction for Systems of Ordinary Differential Equations". He is currently a data scientist at Spotify in New York City.
Wendell Smith received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2016 for his thesis titled "Modeling Diffusion and Motion in Cells at the Molecular Level." He is currently a Software Engineer working on high-throughput data analysis systems at Datadog in New York.
Alice Qinhua Zhou received her Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry in 2014. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled "The power of simple hard sphere models." She is currently a Senior Manager at Ernst&Young in New York City.
Tianqi Shen received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2014. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Computational Studies of Hard Disks: Contact Percolation, Fragility, Frictional Families, and Basin Volumes." He is currently a financial analyst at J.P. Morgan.
Carl Schreck received his Ph.D. in Physics from Yale in 2012. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Mechanical and vibrational properties of model granular media." Carl is currently a Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at the Center for Pediatric Genomic Medicine at Children's Mercy Hospital.
Prasanta Pal, a former Ph.D. student in Applied Physics at Yale, graduated in May, 2011. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Quasi-one-dimensional models for glassy dynamics." Prasanta is a postdoc in the Department of Diagnostic Radiology at Yale University's School of Medicine.
Guo-Jie Jason Gao, a former Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Yale, graduated in August, 2009. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Theoretical and computational studies of small jammed systems." He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical and Systems Engineering at Shizuoka University in Japan.
Ning Xu received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Yale in 2005. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Computer Simulations of Athermal and Glassy Systems." He is now a Professor in the Department of Physics and Deputy Dean of the School of Physical Sciences at the University of Science and Technology of China.
VISITING ASSISTANTS IN RESEARCH
Zhaohui Huang, a Ph.D student from the Department of Engineering Mechanics at Peking University, is a visiting assistant in research during AY 2023-2024. He is carrying out discrete element modeling simulations to design and study granular robotics.
Shiyun Zhang, a Ph.D student from the Department of Physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, is a visiting assistant in research during AY 2019-2020. He is carrying out discrete element modeling simulations and machine learning techniques applied to metallic glasses.
Fansheng Xiong, a Ph.D student from the Department of Applied Mathematics at Tsinghua University, is a visiting assistant in research during AY 2018-2019. He is carrying out discrete element modeling simulations of shear jamming in frictional granular materials.
Yan Chen, a Ph.D student from the Department of Engineering Mechanics at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, is a visiting assistant in research during AY 2018-2019. She is carrying out experimental studies of acoustic switches using granular crystals.
Ye Yuan, a Ph.D student from the Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science at Peking University, is a visiting assistant in research during AY 2018-2019. He is using discrete element method simulations to study shear jamming in packings of nonspherical grains.
Chunyang Cui, a Ph.D student from the Department of Hydraulic Engineering at Tsinghua University, is a visiting assistant in research during AY 2017-2018. He is using discrete element method simulations to study the self-assembly of granular crystals during vibration.
Chengdong Li is a visiting assistant in research in the O'Hern research group from 10/1/17 through 9/30/18. He is a Ph.D. student from the Department of Lfie Sciences and Biotechnology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. While at Yale, he will use molecular dynamics simulations to design protein-protein interfaces.
Kaiyuan Zhu, a Ph.D. student from the Department of Material Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is a visiting assistant in research during AY 2017-2018. At Yale, he uses molecular dynamics simulations to study memory formation in bulk metallic glasses during shear.
Sheng Chen, a Ph.D. student from the Department of Thermal Engineering at Tsinghua University, is a visiting assistant in research during the AY 2017-2018. At Yale, he is studying shear jamming in frictionless and frictional granular media.
Weiwei Jin, a Ph.D. student from the Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science at Peking University, was a visiting assistant in research during AY 2016-2017. At Yale, he studied jammed packings of circulo-polygons.
Zhusong Li, a Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York advised by Prof. Mark Shattuck, worked as a visiting assistant in research from 2013-2015. At Yale he focused on jamming and crystallization in particulate systems.
Fei Jianbo, a Ph.D. candidate from the Institute of Geotechnical Engineering at Tsinghua University, China, was a visiting assistant in research from 2014-2015. At Yale, he worked on developing discrete element simulations of avalanches in fully fluid-immersed granular systems during slump test and inclined plane flows.
Hanne Antila, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemistry of Aalto University, in Finland, was a visitng assistant in research from 2013-2015. She worked on multiscale modelling of charged polymers using all-atom molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations.
Florian Ulmann, was a visiting assistant in research during 2014 from the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Mark Kanner was a visiting assistant in research during 2013-2014 from The City College of New York (CCNY).
Jukka Määttä was a visting assistant in research during 2012-2013 from Aalto University, Finland.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
· Matthew Barber (Physics, Yale College, 2009); Associate at Flexpoint Ford.
· Erik Brown (Physics, Yale College, 2006).
· Mitchell Butler (Biophysics, University of Southern California, 2018).
· Brianna Chrisman (Applied Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Yale College, 2015); Software Engineer at Google.
· Manolis Davris (Mechanical Engineering, Yale College, 2012); Senior Associate at Novantas.
· Evan Feinberg (Applied Physics, Yale College, 2013); Ph.D. student, Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University.
· Jonathan Hartman (Mechanical Engineering, Yale College, 2009); Global Technology Partnerships Lead at Sikorsky Aircraft.
· Nabeem Hashem (Applied Physics, Yale College, 2012); Analyst J.P. Morgan Chase.
· Po-Yi Ho (Physics, Yale College, 2013); Ph.D. student, Department of Physics, Harvard University.
· Nathaniel Knapp (Chemical Engineering, Yale College, 2014); Masters Student at TU Munchen.
· Matthew Kremer (Applied Physics, Yale College, 2011); Team Marketing and Business Operations for the National Basketball Association.
· Dominic Kwok (Physics, Yale College, 2013); Senior Analyst at Altman, Vilandrie & Company.
· Georgia Lill (Applied Math, Yale College, 2013); Research Associate in Bioinformatics at UCLA.
· Jaibin Liu (Physics, Bryn Mawr College, 2014).
· Maxwell Micali (Mechanical Engineering, Yale College, 2012); Ph.D. student, Department of Mechanical Engineering, UC Berkeley.
· Sarah Penrose (Chemistry, Connecticut College, 2013); Software Engineer at Amazon.
· Benjamin Pollak (Physics, Washington University in St. Louis, 2014).
· Aman Richard (Mechanical Engineering, Yale College, 2014).
· Alyssa Roland (Mechanical Engineering, Yale College, 2011); Associate at Credit Suisse.
· Ian Rose (Physics, Yale College, 2009).
· Christina Schindler (Physics, Heidelberg University, 2012).
· Saranya Sethuraman (Applied Math, Yale College, 2011).
· Ajay Shalwala (Chemical Engineering, Yale College, 2005); M. D. from Washington University in St. Louis.
· Sherwin Soltani (Physics, Yale College, 2012); M. D. from Medical University of South Carolina.
· Stefan Stanojevic (Physics, Brandeis University, 2014); Ph. D. student, Department of Physics.
· Rebecca Taft (Physics, Yale College, 2008); Ph.D. student, Department of Computer Science, MIT.
· Phillippa Thomson (Mechanical Engineering, Yale College, 2006); Graduate Student at Columbia University.
· Aishwarya Vijay (Electrical Engineering, Yale College, 2014).
· Michael Weiner (Physics, Yale College, 2011); Ph. D. stuent, Department of Physics, Cornell University.
· Amy Werner-Allen (Applied Math, Yale College, 2011); Consultant at Arcadia Healthcare Solutions.
· William Henry Wilkin (Physics, Yale College, 2013); Ph. D. student, Department of Physics, Harvard University.
· Wesley Wilson (Applied Physics, Yale College, 2012); Tutoring Club Temecula.
· Alix Witthoft (Physics, Mount Holyoke College, 2007); Ph.D. Student, School of Engineering, Brown University.
· Christopher Yerino (Physics, Yale College, 2006); Ph. D. Student, Department of Electrical Engineering, Yale University.