Jens joined the mathematics department in 2007. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. He held post doctoral positions at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Glasgow, and visiting positions at Oregon State and Portland State. Before coming to Boise he was an associate professor at Western Kentucky University.
Jens is primarily interested in low dimensional topology and geometric group theory. Much of his works lies in the study of spaces of dimension 2 and 3, and their fundamental groups.
Relative vertex asphericity, with S. Rosebrock, Canadian Mathematical Bulletin, Volume 64, Issue 2, (2021).
Directed diagrammatic reducibility, with S. Rosebrock, Topology and its Applications, Volume 282, (2020).
Chapter 1 and Chapter 6 in Advances in Two-Dimensional Homotopy and Combinatorial Group Theory; Cambridge University Press, LMS Lecture Notes 446 (Editors: Metzler and Rosebrock) (2018).
Injective labeled oriented trees are aspherical, with S. Rosebrock, Mathematische Zeitschrift 287 (1), (2017).
