Carsten Krebs Awarded a Society for Biological Inorganic Chemistry Early Career Award

Carsten Krebs, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and a professor of chemistry at Penn State University, has been chosen by the Society for Biological Inorganic Chemistry (SBIC) as the recipient of the Society's 2012 Early Career Award. The SBIC Early Career Award has been described as the signature award in the field of biological inorganic chemistry. It is awarded to the most meritorious scientist who has completed no more than 15 years of distinguished research in the field. The award comes with a monetary prize and a plaque, and will be presented to Krebs before his plenary lecture at the 16th International Conference for Biological Inorganic Chemistry in Grenoble, France.

Krebs is a bioinorganic chemist whose research interests concern iron-containing enzymes; primarily, the activation of oxygen by non-heme enzymes. These enzymes play key roles in human biochemistry and are involved in diverse biological processes, including oxygen sensing, DNA repair, and gene regulation. Krebs has a joint research group with J. Martin Bollinger, Jr., a Penn State professor of chemistry and of biochemistry and molecular biology. Together, they study the function of these enzymes using a combination of spectroscopic, kinetic, biochemical, and molecular-biological methods.

Krebs's other awards and honors include a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, which he earned in 2006, and a Young Investigator Award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, which he earned in 2005. In addition, he was honored with a Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry in 2008.

Before joining the Penn State faculty, Krebs was a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University from 1997 to 2002. He 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 was promoted to associate professor in 2007 and to full professor in 2012.

Krebs earned a doctoral degree in inorganic chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Radiation Chemistry in Mülheim, Germany in 1997. He earned bachelor's and diploma degrees at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany in 1991 and 1994, respectively.