Dr. O’Bryan's interdisciplinary research spans complex systems science, behavioral ecology, psychology, and engineering. Her research is centered on understanding the mechanism and function of the communication systems underlying collective social behaviors (behavioral coordination, collective decision-making) across both non-human and human species. As part of her work, Dr. O’Bryan develops novel methodological and computational approaches for understanding and predicting collective social behaviors. By employing new technologies (e.g., wearable dataloggers, audio-visual recording, web apps), she captures detailed data on individual and group behaviors, and analyses these data using statistical methods, computational models, and machine learning. Past studies have explored collective movement and decision-making in free-ranging animal groups and collective intelligence in human teams. Her long-term goal is to conduct comparative research across social groups to illuminate the shared (and unique) communication mechanisms underlying collective social behaviors. By harnessing this knowledge, she aims to address important social challenges, such as enhancing collective intelligence in human groups, improving the conservation or management of animal groups, and informing the design of distributed artificial systems.

Dr. O’Bryan received a B.S. in Zoology from Texas A&M University, College Station and a Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In 2015 she was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Studying Complex Systems from the James S. McDonnell Foundation and joined the Department of Biological Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 2018 she joined Rice University as a Rice Academy Postdoctoral Fellow working across the departments of Psychological Sciences and Engineering. In 2024 she became an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.