Grant Jensen
Dr. Jensen was born in 1970 and grew up in the science-focused town of Los Alamos, New Mexico. After studying physics and math at Brigham Young University Grant entered an M.D./Ph.D. program at Stanford. He earned his doctorate in Biophysics working on electron microscopy of RNA polymerase and other protein complexes with Dr. Roger Kornberg (who later won the Nobel prize for structural studies of transcription). Opting not to finish his medical training, instead Grant continued his work in protein electron microscopy as a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell post-doctoral fellow under the supervision of Dr. Kenneth Downing at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Here his interests expanded to include electron tomography of whole cells. Grant launched his own lab at Caltech starting in 2002. At Caltech his research has focused on three main areas: the ultrastructure of small cells, the structural biology of HIV, and the further development of cryo-EM technology. Together with his colleagues he has now published nearly 100 papers in these areas (see http://www.jensenlab.caltech.edu/publications.html). His lab has developed a searchable tomography database and populated it with ~15 thousand cryotomograms of over 100 different viral and microbial samples. Meanwhile his teaching has centered on biophysical methods, including most recently the creation of a 10-hour online course “Getting started in Cryo-EM.” Among his awards and honors are that he was chosen as a Searle Scholar in 2004, as Chair of the American Society of Microbiology’s Division of Cell and Structural Biology in 2007, and as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2008. He was given tenure in 2008 and promoted to full Professor in 2010. He and his wife Angela live with their six children in Arcadia, California.
Abstracts this author is presenting: