Public Lecture by Professor Bernie Kraatz

Growing up Star Trek. How do we make sense of it all?

A public lecture by Bernie Kraatz, Professor of Chemistry and Vice-Principal Research, University of Toronto Scarborough, and 2018 UWA Robert and Maude Gledden Visiting Fellow.

Star Trek predicted many of the devices that now have a tremendous impact in our day-to-day lives. Devices like cellphones, tablet computers, and medical sensors for diagnostics, are all around us and many were dreamt up in the offices of Hollywood studios long before their invention by scientists and engineers.

Developing new Star Trek devices, like the “medical tricorder” is what drives many of us in science and engineering fields - devices that allow us to remotely detect dangers and diseases. And as chemists, we play a central role in the discovery of processes that allow us to detect diseases. This is a very personal coming of age story of a boy discovering his love for anything Trek and chemistry and his quest for the “medical tricorder” and turning fiction into science.

Bernie Kraatz is Professor of Chemistry and Vice-Principal Research at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His awards include the PetroCanada Young Innovator Award and the Award in Pure or Applied Inorganic Chemistry from the Canadian Society for Chemistry. He received the Florence Bucke Science Prize and became Faculty Scholar and a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Western Ontario.

Professor Kraatz was the Canadian Research Chair in Biomaterials and his research interests are in the use of bioconjugates for the design of biosensors, surface-supported functional bioconjugates, and bio(nano)materials. His research group has pioneered the development of synthetic methods for peptide conjugates that allow tailoring the materials properties ranging from stimuli-responsive peptide gels to sensor materials for the detection of pathogens in water or for quantifying biochemical phosphorylation events.

Professor Kraatz is a 2018 Robert and Maude Gledden Visiting Fellow at The University of Western Australia.