Owen Hickey

Owen Hickey
Postdoc

Office:	210
Phone:	+49 711 685-63594
Fax:	+49 711 685-63658
Email:	ohickey _at_ icp.uni-stuttgart.de
Address:	Owen Hickey Institute for Computational Physics Universität Stuttgart Allmandring 3 70569 Stuttgart Germany

Research

I am interested in the simulation of electrokinetic phenomena, namely electrophoresis and electroosmotic flow, involving polymers. Particularly I am interested in simulating systems which have yet to be explored using molecular dynamics and the sometimes surprising results of the interplay between electrostatic and hydrodynamic interactions.

I have made a number of videos (with much help from Georg Rempfer) which illustrate some of the intricacies of electrokinetics, particularly with regard to polyelectrolyte electrophoresis. They can be found here [1]

Publications

Hickey O.A., Modulating Electro-osmotic Flow with Polymer Coatings, Ph.D. thesis, University of Ottawa 2012 [2]

Shendruk T.N., Hickey O.A., Slater G.W., Harden J.L.. Electrophoresis: When hydrodynamics matter, 2012 17 (2), Current Opinion in Colloid and Interface Science [3]

Hickey O.A., Holm C., Harden J.L. and Slater G.W., Influence of Charged Polymer Coatings on Electro-Osmotic Flow: Molecular Dynamics Simulations, 2011 44 (23), Macromolecules, pp 9455–9463 [4]

Hickey O.A., Harden J.L., Holm C. and Slater G.W., Implicit method for simulating electrohydrodynamics of polyelectrolytes, 2010 105 (14), 148301, Physical Review Letters [5]

Slater G.W., Holm C., Chubynsky M.V., de Haan H.W., Dube A., Grass K., Hickey O.A., Kingsburry C., Sean D., Shendruk T.N. and Zhan L., Modeling the separation of macromolecules: a review of current computer simulation methods, 2009, Electrophoresis 20 (5), pp.792-818 [6]

Hickey O.A., Harden J.L. and Slater G.W., Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Optimal Dynamic Uncharged Polymer Coatings for Quenching Electro-osmotic Flow, 2009, Physical Review Letters 102 (10), 108304 [7]

Hickey O.A. and Slater G.W., The diffusion coefficient of a polymer in an array of obstacles is a non-monotonic function of the degree of disorder in the medium, 2007, Physics Letters, Section A: General, Atomic and Solid State Physics 364 (6), pp. 448-452 [8]

Hickey O.A., Mercier, J-F, Gauthier, M.G., Tessier, F., Bekhechi S. and Slater G.W., Effective molecular diffusion coefficient in a two-phase gel medium,  2006, Journal of Chemical Physics 124 (20), 204903 [9]