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Jason Keith
Department/Office Information
ChemistryI was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1978 and moved to the small town of Weatherford, Texas with my parents and older brother when I was eight years old. I graduated from Weatherford High School in 1997. Upon graduation I went on to the University of North Texas where I pursued degrees in Chemistry and Mathematics. I graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2001. In the fall of that same year I began my graduate work at the California Institute of Technology and received my PhD in Chemistry in 2008. While there I was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. From 2008 to 2010 I was a postdoctoral fellow with Michael B. Hall in the Chemistry Department at Texas A&M University. In 2010 I moved to the mountains of northern New Mexico were I was a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory until 2013. In the summer of 2013 I left the mountains that I had come to love and a life sharing a border with Mexico to move northeast to central New York and a new understanding of winter.
I am currently an Associate Professor of Chemistry here at vlog having received tenure in Spring 2020. My research here is based on the application of Density Functional Theory to various projects involving electronic structure, spectroscopy and mechanism. My primary research efforts focus on transition metal systems although I have soft spot for f-block elements from my time at LANL and have also on occasion worked with main group and organic systems. While my research frequently focuses on fundamental concepts such as bonding, applied projects in my group are more commonplace and are often related to clean energy and the environment. I have publications in the areas of fuel cells, biofuels, nuclear energy, as well as environmental cleanup. I currently collaborate with many experimental chemists both here at vlog and elsewhere.