Isaac Krauss
Isaac Krauss, Associate Professor of Chemistry, has won the 2015 Michael L. Walzer ’56 Award for Teaching. This award is given every year to a tenure track faculty member who “combines superlative scholarship with inspired teaching.”
Isaac teaches “Organic Chemistry” for undergraduates and “Advanced Organic Chemistry: Synthesis I and II” at the graduate level. His departmental service includes participation in the Chemistry department’s graduate admissions and graduate studies committee, colloquium committee and curriculum committee. His interactions with students include advising first years and majors; supervising students in his lab; serving on senior thesis and dissertation committees, and organizing a Chamber Music Brunch and playing chamber music with undergraduates on campus.
A few comments from student nominators include:
“Isaac cares about every single one of his students. Not only does he excel at teaching large lecture classes, he is a fantastic mentor to students.
“He makes sure to know every students name in a class of 200.”
Isaac is the recipient of the 15th Annual Strage Award for Aspiring Young Science Faculty, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the 2012 Thieme Chemistry Journal Award. His expertise is in the field of chemical glycobiology, and he and his lab are researching possible HIV vaccines, using directed evolution of modified DNA and petides to create antigenic mimics of the virus.
He is a graduate of Stanford University and earned his MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Columbia University. Isaac joined the Brandeis faculty in 2008, He has received grants from NIH and NSF, and his articles have been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and the Journal of Organic Chemistry, with his work highlighted in Chemical & Engineering News and reviewed in Nature Chemical Biology and Current Opinion in Chemical Biology.
