Team
Current members of the lab

402 Benkovic Building
Penn State University
University Park, PA 16802
Edward P. O’Brien
Professor of Chemistry and Institute for Computational and Data Sciences
Research Focus: Physical bioinformatics and computational biophysics, specializing in co-translational protein folding, translation elongation kinetics, and protein misfolding mechanisms. His lab develops computational methods to understand how proteins achieve their functional conformations during synthesis and how this process relates to disease.
He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics at the University of Maryland in 2008 with Prof. Dave Thirumalai and joined Penn State University in 2014.

XXX Benkovic Building
Penn State University
University Park, PA 16802
Yang Jiang
Assistant Research Professor
Research Focus: Computational biophysics and protein folding mechanisms, with emphasis on understanding molecular origins of protein misfolding and developing computational methods to predict and prevent misfolding-related diseases.
He obtained his Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry/Biophysics and joined the O’Brien lab as Assistant Research Professor.

407 Benkovic Building
Penn State University
University Park, PA 16802
Quyen V. Vu
Postdoctoral Scholar
Research Focus: Computational biophysics and molecular dynamics simulations of protein folding and misfolding mechanisms.
He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics (Computational Biophysics) at the Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences in 2023 and joined the O’Brien lab since 2024.

406 Benkovic Building
Penn State University
University Park, PA 16802
Maria F. Anglero
Master Student
Research Focus: Investigating protein entanglement mechanisms and their association with human diseases through computational analysis of the human proteome.

413 Benkovic Building
Penn State University
University Park, PA 16802
Tram Ha
Graduate Student
Research Focus: