Long was born on May 15, 1969, and grew up in
Rolla, Missouri. Long's father is Gary J. Long, Prof. Emeritus of Chemistry at the
Missouri University of Science and Technology, who is a pioneer in studying iron-containing molecules and solids using
Mössbauer spectroscopy. Jeffrey credits his father's influence in sparking his passion for science, by introducing Jeffrey to the beauty of symmetry and structure of inorganic compounds and by having him edit the references in manuscripts as a young child. Long attended
Cornell University for his undergraduate studies, where he majored in chemistry and mathematics and graduated
summa cum laude and
cum laude, respectively. At Cornell, Long carried out research with
Nobel Laureate and poet Prof.
Roald Hoffman, using principles of
molecular orbital theory to determine the solid-state
band structure of metal carbides. For his course work and research at Cornell, Long was awarded the Mandelkern Prize in 1991. After graduating from Cornell, Long moved to
Harvard University as an
Office of Naval Research Predoctoral Fellow, where he carried out his doctoral research in the laboratory of Prof.
Richard H. Holm. At Harvard, Long's work focused on the study of inorganic-solid frameworks and developed theoretical and experimental routes to decrease the dimensionality of these frameworks from three to two-dimensional sheets, to one-dimensional chains, to zero-dimensional molecular clusters. This general approach, coined by Long as “dimensional reduction”, has enabled new and reliable solution-based synthetic routes to cluster-based molecules and materials. For this work, Long received a Ph.D. in Chemistry From Harvard in 1995. After continuing with Holm for a brief postdoctoral study at Harvard, Long moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he carried out postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Prof.
A. Paul Alivisatos as a
National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow. == Independent career ==