About me

I’m a lecturer and researcher at the University of Michigan School of Information. I study how scientists program with generative AI programming tools. I also serve as the director of the Graduate Data Science Certificate program at the Michigan Institute for Data, AI and Society. My research is generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Digital Technology Fund.

Select papers

Full publication list can be found on Google Scholar.

O’Brien, G. (2025). Threats to scientific software from over-reliance on AI code assistants. Nature Computational Science, 1-3.

O’Brien, G. (2025). How Scientists Use Large Language Models to Program. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-16).

O’Brien, E., & Mick, J. (2024). In the Academy, Data Science Is Lonely: Barriers to Adopting Data Science Methods for Scientific Research. Harvard Data Science Review, 6(2).

O’Brien, G., Ganjigunta, R., & Dhillon, P. S. (2024). Wellness influencer responses to COVID-19 vaccines on social media: a longitudinal observational study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 26, e56651.