Oliver M. O’Reilly is a Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and vice provost for undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.E. in mechanical engineering from the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). Subsequently, he received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University. At Cornell, he studied under Phil Holmes and Frank Moon. After spending two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut für Mechanik at ETH-Zürich under Jürg Dual, he joined the faculty in mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley.
His interests span the fields of continuum mechanics and nonlinear dynamics. He has a broad range of specializations including directed (or Cosserat) theories of deformable bodies, constrained rigid body dynamics, contact mechanics, linear and nonlinear vibrations, and linear and nonlinear dynamics of deformable bodies. He has applied these interests to a range of applications including soft robots, MEMS resonators, brake squeal, the dynamics of toys, motorcycle navigation, axially moving media, artificial and natural satellites, spinal kinematics, and vehicle collision dynamics. O’Reilly has coauthored over 80 archival journal articles and written two textbooks and is a co-inventor on two patents. He has also received multiple teaching awards including UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999, the Pi-Tau-Sigma Professor of the Year Award in 2003, and the Tau-Beta-Pi Outstanding Faculty of the Year Award in 2013.
O’Reilly currently serves as a contributing editor for the journal Nonlinear Dynamics and is on the editorial boards of the following journals: Nonlinearity, International Journal of Nonlinear Mechanics, Regular and Chaotic Dynamics, and Nonlinear Dynamics and Mobile Robots.