VIDEO: MIHS Valedictorian Featured In PBS Nature Series

By Space Coast Daily // April 12, 2015

O'Hern Explains Engineering Marvels Of Bird Nests

ABOVE VIDEO: Yale University Engineering and Physics Professor Corey O’Hern was a featured expert on the “Animal Homes: Nests” episode of PBS’ “Nature” series. O’Hern was under the weather during the filming of the episode but was happy to provide his expertise on bird habitats. He graduated as Merritt Island High School’s Valedictorian in 1990. The episode aired on April 8, 2015. O’Hern is introduced at the 29:37 mark.

Merritt Island High grad Corey O’Hern is an Adjunct Professor with Tenure in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, Applied Physics, and Physics and Graduate Program in Computational Biology & Bioinformatics at Yale.

Yale University Engineering and Physics Professor Corey O'Hern was a featured expert on the "Animal Homes: Nests" episode of PBS' "Nature" series. — Yale University Engineering and Physics Professor Corey O’Hern was a featured expert on the “Animal Homes: Nests” episode of PBS’ “Nature” series.

Before joining the faculty at Yale, O’Hern 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.

O’Hern 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.

O’Hern 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 knowledge did not break anything!

For nearly 30 years, O’Hern’s parents, pediatrician Dr. Richard O’Hern and pediatric nurse practicioner Karen O’Hern cared for thousands of children across the Space Coast at their medical practice, Pediatrics of Brevard. O’Hern lives in New Haven, with his wife, Jennifer Miller O’Hern, who was raised in Merritt Island and also graduated from Merritt Island High School. She now works as a pediatric nurse practitioner in New Haven.