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Grant Jensen (he/him/his)

Dean
Brigham Young University
Provo, Utah, United States

Grant Jensen is a Professor of Biochemistry and Dean of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. He earned his doctorate 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) at Stanford University. Next 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. There his interests expanded to include electron tomography of whole cells. Grant began his independent career at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) 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 200 papers in these areas (see http://www.jensenlab.caltech.edu/publications.html). His lab has developed a searchable tomography database and populated it with ~50 thousand cryotomograms of over 100 different viral and microbial samples (https://etdb.caltech.edu/). Among his most prominent discoveries has been the structure and function of the bacterial type VI secretion system, a "poison-tipped spring-loaded molecular dagger," and the architecture of the type IV pilus responsible for cell motility. All this work is now summarized in an electronic textbook, the Atlas of Bacterial and Archaeal Cell Structure (https://www.cellstructureatlas.org/). Meanwhile Grant’s teaching has centered on biophysical methods, including the creation of the popular online course Getting started in Cryo-EM (http://cryo-em-course.caltech.edu/). In 2020 Grant moved to BYU to become Dean of their College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.

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