Grant Jensen began serving as the dean of the College of Computational, Mathematical and Physical Sciences on November 1, 2020. Prior to coming to BYU, Jensen was a professor of biophysics and the director of the Caltech Center for Cryo-EM at the California Institute of Technology. He has pioneered the field of electron cryotomography, an imaging technique used to produce high-resolution 3D views of cells and viruses. He has nearly 200 publications, many in top peer-reviewed journals, including Science, Nature and Cell. He summarized the highlight discoveries of his career in a free online textbook, The Atlas of Bacterial and Archaeal Cell Structure. To train the next generation of cryo-EM researchers, he developed and recorded a popular series of lectures, “Getting Started in Cryo-EM,” with over a million modules viewed so far.
Jensen received a Ph.D. in biophysics from Stanford University working under future Nobel Laureate Roger Kornberg and then did postdoctoral work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at BYU, with a minor in mathematics, and was named the 1994 valedictorian for his college.
His remarks will be broadcast live on BYUtv, BYUtv.org (and archived for on-demand streaming), KBYU-TV 11, Classical 89 FM, BYUradio 107.9 FM, and SiriusXM 143. Video, text, and audio are archived on speeches.byu.edu.