Corey S. O'Hern

About

Corey S. O'Hern is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Yale University with additional appointments in Applied Physics, Materials Science, Computational Biology & Biomedical Informatics, and Physics. His research focuses on the statistical mechanics of nonequilibrium systems, glass and jamming transitions in soft matter, computational biology, and protein structure, interactions, and design. He has received several awards including the Ackerman Teaching Award in 2018, was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2017, and has been recognized with awards from the National Science Foundation. His work involves exploring the fundamental physical principles underlying complex systems, soft matter, and biological structures, contributing significantly to the understanding of material behavior, protein folding, and biological morphogenesis.

Selected publications

• Machine learning versus human learning in predicting glass-forming ability of metallic glasses

  Acta Materialia · 2022 · 49 citations

  Complex materials science problems such as glass formation must consider large system sizes that are many orders of magnitude too large to be solved by first-principles calculations. The successful application of machine learning (ML) in various other fields suggests that ML could be useful to address complex problems in materials science. To test its efficacy, we attempt to predict bulk metallic glass formation using ML. Surprisingly, we find that a recently developed ML model based on 201 allo…

  PublisherDOI

• The structural, vibrational, and mechanical properties of jammed packings of deformable particles in three dimensions

  Soft Matter · 2021 · 35 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  ≈ 0.5 for packings of deformable particles with non-zero bending energy, which matches the value for jammed packings of soft, spherical particles with fixed shape. These studies underscore the importance of incorporating particle deformability and shape change when modeling the properties of jammed soft materials.

  DOI

• Evolution of adaptive force chains in reconfigurable granular metamaterials

  Soft Matter · 2025-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Joule heating, which softens the particle. As the particle cools to room temperature, the alloy solidifies and the particle recovers its original modulus. To optimize the mechanical response of granular packings containing both soft and stiff particles, we employ an evolutionary algorithm coupled with discrete element method simulations to predict the patterns of particle moduli that will yield specific force outputs on the assembly boundaries. The predicted patterns of particle moduli from the…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Protein Folding as a Jamming Transition

  PRX Life · 2025-03-27 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Proteins fold to a specific functional conformation with a densely packed core that controls their stability. Despite their importance, we lack a quantitative explanation for why all protein cores, regardless of their overall fold, possess the same average packing fraction <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><a:mrow><a:mo>〈</a:mo><a:mi>ϕ</a:mi><a:mo>〉</a:mo><a:mo>≈</a:mo><a:mn>0.55</a:mn></a:mrow></a:math>. However, important developments in the physics of jamming in particulate…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A cadherin-integrin–ECM code for presomitic mesoderm fluidity

  Development · 2025-09-25 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Animal tissues exist within a continuum of fluid to solid states, and transitions between states are important for embryonic development, wound healing and cancer metastasis. Fluid-to-solid transitions are governed by the ratio of adhesive energy to kinetic energy. Here, we find that presomitic mesoderm solidification is driven by an intrinsic decline in cell speed along with an increase in adhesion mediated by Cadherin 2 in parallel with fibronectin and its receptor Integrin α5. A computational…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Awards & honors

• Ackerman Teaching Award (2018)
• Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (2017)
• Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation Award from the Nation…
• Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Sci…

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