Krebs Receives Beckman Award and Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award

19 September 2006—Carsten Krebs, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and of chemistry, has received a Young Investigator Award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. He also has received a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

Krebs is a bioinorganic chemist whose research interests concern iron-containing enzymes. His main research interest concerns the activation of oxygen by non-heme enzymes.  These enzymes play key roles in human biochemistry and are involved in diverse biological processes, including sensing of oxygen, synthesis and repair of DNA, and gene regulation. Krebs studies the function of these enzymes using a combination of spectroscopic, kinetic, biochemical, and molecular-biological methods in a highly interdisciplinary research program together with J. Martin Bollinger, Jr., associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and of chemistry.

Krebs joined the faculty at Penn State as an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in 2002 and was named assistant professor of chemistry in 2004. He earned his bachelor’s degree and diploma degrees at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, in 1991 and 1994, respectively. He earned his doctoral degree in inorganic chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Radiation Chemistry in Mülheim, Germany, in 1997. He also was a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University from 1997 to 2002.

The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award recognizes young faculty members in the early stages of their academic careers. Since 1991, the Beckman Foundation has awarded more than 230 Young Investigator Awards to young scientists at prominent universities and research institutions across the United States.

The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation’s Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards focus primarily on talented young faculty in the chemical sciences at research universities in the United States. Selection criteria for the award include the individual’s research and teaching excellence.

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