Dennis Krause came to Wabash in 1998 after finishing a three-year stint as a visiting professor at Williams College. Wabash was a perfect fit for Prof. Krause who discovered he wanted to teach at a quality liberal arts college while an undergraduate at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota. At Wabash, he is also able to collaborate with researchers at Purdue University (where received his Ph.D. and where he is an adjunct physics professor) and Indiana University. While he is a theoretical physicist, Prof. Krause works closely with experimentalists since he believes that physics must be firmly grounded in experiments, which provide the true test of a theory’s validity.  His research focuses on the phenomenology of ultra-low-energy fundamental physics beyond the Standard Model (e.g., the search for new forces and dark matter using tabletop experiments) and fundamental issues of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.

Prof. Krause sees research and teaching as being integral to each other. To see what a physicist really does, a student needs to work on a problem with no known answer. And to teach, a teacher must go beyond the textbook and know how physics is really done.   He has brought his research into the classroom and involved students in his research, and he has used ideas inspired by his teaching in his research. It is also important to Prof. Krause to use the latest results of physics education research to try to better understand how his students think and to improve his teaching. All of this takes up most of his time, but when he needs a break, Prof. Krause can be found running the streets of Crawfordsville or perfecting his skills as the Physics Department’s unofficial “grillmeister.”

Krause talks about his 2015 presentation at the 36th LaFollette Lecture.