Bernie Kraatz

Research Interests

Bernie (H.-B.) Kraatz (PhD 1993, U. Calgary). After his initial faculty appointment at the U. Saskatchewan (1998-2007), he moved to Western U. (2007-2011) and accepted a faculty position at the U. Toronto, where he is now Chair in the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences. He has received several awards including the PetroCanada Young Innovator Award (2000), the Canadian Research Chair in Biomaterials (2001-2007), and in 2006 the Award in Pure or Applied Inorganic Chemistry from the Canadian Society for Chemistry. In addition, he received the Florence Bucke Science Prize (2009) and became Faculty Scholar and a Distinguished Research Professor (2010).

His research is focused on the design of biosensors, surface-supported functional bioconjugates, and bio(nano)materials. He has pioneered work on redox-active peptides, explored their self-assembly properties and exploited them for monitoring protein binding and protein or even whole cell biosensing by electrochemical methods.

He works the fabrication of chip-based electrochemical sensors for mismatch detection in DNA, nucleobase sequencing, protein detection, and monitoring enzymatic activities and is working on multidimensional and multifunctional sensor arrays.