Bio
Keitel earned a B.S. in Electronics Engineering (National University of Engineering) in his native Perú, where he did some robotics projects and later jumped into the nano world by working under the direction of Dr. Jorge Seminario (Texas A&M) using computational quantum chemistry. Then, he crossed the Pacific Ocean to do research under the guidance of Dr. Satoshi Murata (Tohoku University) and earned a Ph.D. and a M.Eng. after working on the engineering of dynamic DNA structures driven by physico-chemical interactions. After this, he crossed Eurasia to work as Postdoctoral Researcher in the group of Dr. Matteo Palma (Queen Mary University of London), where he researched single-molecule DNA origami aptasensors and chemical functionalization of carbon nanotubes to develop single-molecule junctions.
Here in Boise, he is extremely happy to be back to the Americas by joining the Quantum DNA research group as a Research Scholar where he is working with Dr. Wan Kuang and other group members to harness molecular excitonic electronic coherence enabled through DNA nanotechnology with single-molecule resolution. In this project DNA-templated dye aggregates are studied by using super-resolution light microscopy for developing an understanding of the positional and orientational precision of the dyes to achieve applications in quantum computing. Keitel is supported by his experience in structural and dynamic DNA nanotechnology, single-molecule fluorescence microscopy, programming and DNA-PAINT, and as well as an interest in finding new phenomena by integrating other systems and molecules with DNA nanotechnology.