Professor Rui Werner Krause is Professor of Organic and Medicinal Chemistry at Rhodes University, having previously worked at the University of Johannesburg, Wits Technikon and the University of the Witwatersrand. His research interests lie in medicinal chemistry, natural products, stimuli-responsive drug delivery and nanomaterials. He is responsible for teaching and research across all levels of both undergraduate and postgraduate work in the sub-fields relating to Organic Chemistry and Medicinal Chemistry.
Prof Krause has experience in synthesis and characterisation, mostly of small organic molecules, natural products, and "Fragment-Based" molecules. He also is involved in supervising projects in Stimuli-Responsive Drug Delivery.
His experience includes hands-on operation of instruments including Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometers, (NMR of both solution and solid-state techniques), mass spectrometers (GC-MS and LC-MS), and several other structural- and physical-properties measurements. He currently manages the High-Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (HR-NMR) Laboratory as well as the Mass Spectrometry Facility Laboratory at Rhodes.
The Department also has access to X-ray diffraction (both PXRD and SC-XRD), Electron-beam techniques (TEM and SEM), and other thermal (TGA, DSC) and molecular techniques (CD-spectra, Raman spectroscopy) etc.
Prof Krause has supervised to completion more than 50 postgraduate students over the last 10 years, and currently runs a diverse research group focusing mostly on synthetic medicinal chemistry, marine natural products, and SR-drug delivery.
He is a member of the Anti-Microbial Research Hub, and previously set up and ran a number of research entities including the University of Johannesburg Centre for Nanomaterials from 2005, the BioMaterialsSouthAfrica (BioMatASA) Initiative in 2008, and was a founding and current member of the Centre of Excellence in Strong Materials (CoE-SM).
