New faculty member Ken Christensen will bring new excitement and expertise to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry this fall.
Christensen and his family were living in South Carolina where he worked at Clemson University as an associate professor. In 2013, he received a letter asking him to consider applying for a faculty position at BYU.
“It sat on my dining table for a while,” Christensen said. “My wife and I talked about it. We sat down, revised the teaching statement and a few grant proposals, and submitted it the day before the deadline.”
After being interviewed in December 2013, he was approached by BYU in May 2014 to negotiate about the job.
“They pretty much accommodated all my needs,” Christensen said. “At that point, I thought, ‘Maybe we’ll go to BYU.’”
Later in the summer of 2014, he and his family made the decision to move to Utah in May 2015. Christensen will be teaching Chemistry 105 in the fall and an upper-division class in the winter.
Christensen first became interested in chemistry in high school. After getting a summer job that extended beyond the bounds of general chemistry, his passion grew for the science and he continued to pursue it as a degree.
Although he did not originally plan to become a professor, he decided to give it a shot—since then he has enjoyed research, teaching chemistry classes, and advising students.
“I hope to have fun and do some meaningful science,” Christensen said. “[I want to] train future scientists, graduate students and undergraduates, to go on and make an impact in the world with whatever they want to do.”
Throughout his career, Christensen has had the opportunity to work on advancing aspects of biomedical research.
In 2004, Christensen and one of his peers began researching how to use anthrax to shrink tumors and treat eye diseases. They have been awarded at least four grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to conduct this research.
“It’s hard to figure out a pathway that nobody understands,” Christensen said. “We’re finally at the point where we have a pretty good idea of what might be going on.”
Christensen earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry from BYU in 1992, and then received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Michigan in 1997. Following graduation, he did postdoctoral work in cell biology at the University of Michigan Medical School (1998–2002), and completed additional postdoctoral work in microbiology at Harvard Medical School (2002–2004).