Ben O’Shaughnessy uses mathematical modeling, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and AI methods to study neurotransmission and information processing in the brain and mechanisms of morphogenesis during early development. These processes involve vast numbers of cells and degrees of freedom, so experimental and simulation datasets are correspondingly vast. O’Shaughnessy develops and applies AI methods to extract mechanistic meaning from such datasets and to characterize disease-related phenotypes for diagnosis and therapeutics. Other machine learning methods are being developed to accelerate MD simulations of many-body molecular systems. At the single cell level, O’Shaughnessy studies cell division and cell shape regulation by the actomyosin cortex.

O’Shaughnessy’s background is in statistical mechanics and non-linear dynamics. He received his Ph.D. in Physics at Cambridge University and held a post-doctoral position at the Weizmann Institute of Science before joining Columbia.