Oliver M. O'Reilly

Oliver M. O’Reilly is a Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as Chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate during the 2019-2020 Academic Year and Associate Dean for Graduate Education in the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society during the 2020-2021 Academic Year.

O’Reilly received his BE in Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). Subsequently, he received his MS and PhD degrees in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University, where he studied under Phil Holmes and Frank Moon. After spending two years as a postdoc at the Institut für Mechanik at ETH Zürich under Jürg Dual, he joined the faculty in Mechanical Engineering at Cal in 1992. His interests span the fields of continuum mechanics and nonlinear dynamics.

O’Reilly has published over 100 archival journal articles, written three textbooks, coauthored a recent book on discrete elastic rods and is a co-inventor on two patents. He has also received several 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. In 2021, he was a recipient of the Berkeley Faculty Service Award.