Education

Academic Degrees:
Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, 2025 
M.S., Chemical and Biological Engineering, Seoul National University, 2018 
B.S., Chemical and Biological Engineering, Seoul National University, 2016 

Experience:
Assistant Professor, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Nebraska–Lincoln (2025–Present) 
Research Intern, Toyota Research Institute, Energy & Materials Division (2024)  
Associate Researcher, SK Innovation R&D Center (2018–2021) 

Areas of Interest:
AI-driven autonomous systems for materials discovery 
Multi-modal and foundation models for chemical and materials science 
Machine learning force fields and atomistic simulations  

Selected Publications:
Google Scholar  

• J. Ock, S. Badrinarayanan, R. Magar, A. Antony, A. Barati Farimani*, “Multimodal Language and Graph Learning of Adsorption Configuration in Catalysis,” Nature Machine Intelligence, 2024. 

• J. Ock, P. Mollaei, A. Barati Farimani*, “GradNav: Accelerated Exploration of Potential Energy Surfaces with Gradient-Based Navigation,” Journal of Computational Theory and Chemistry, 2024. 

• J. Ock, C. Guntuboina, A. Barati Farimani*, “Catalyst Energy Prediction with CatBERTa: Unveiling Feature Exploration Strategies through Large Language Models,” ACS Catalysis, 2023. 

• J. Ock, T. Tian, J. Kitchin, Z. Ulissi*, “Beyond Independent Error Assumptions in Large GNN Atomistic Models,” Journal of Chemical Physics, 2023.