Lasse Jensen Receives an American Chemical Society Hewlett-Packard Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in Computational Chemistry

Lasse Jensen, an assistant professor of chemistry at Penn State University, has been selected to receive an American Chemical Society (ACS) Hewlett-Packard Outstanding Junior Faculty Award for 2012. The award program provides a monetary prize for up to four outstanding tenure-track junior faculty members to present their work at ACS National Meetings.

Jensen's research focuses on developing new theoretical and computational tools for addressing important questions relevant to the optical spectroscopy of biological and nanoscale systems. He is particularly interested in understanding how enhanced Raman spectroscopy -- which uses visible light to reveal the structural properties, local interactions, and vibration frequencies of a molecule -- can selectively probe a specific subsystem of a more complex system.

Jensen also studies surface-enhanced Raman scattering, in which a metallic nanostructure can amplify over a million times the Raman signal of molecules near a metal surface. He has used theoretical methods to gain a microscopic understanding of such phenomena. This understanding has provided detailed information not directly available from experiments. It also helps to guide the direction of future experiments.

Jensen's previous honors include a 2011 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers "for addressing fundamental questions relevant to optical spectroscopy of bio- and nano-systems and for exemplary teaching efforts and the dissemination of computational tools to the chemistry community." In 2010, he was honored with the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The CAREER award is the NSF's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent teaching, and the integration of education and research. In 2005, Jensen was awarded an International Conference of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering (ICCMSE) young scientist prize. He received support from an Internalization Fellowship from the Danish Research Agency from 2000 to 2004.

Prior to joining Penn State in June of 2007 as an assistant professor of chemistry, Jensen was a research associate at Northwestern University from 2004 to 2007. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in chemistry at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands in 2004.