Here is a brief bio of Nick Kraus, put together from information he has provided to the department.

At some stage in his career, probably very early, he used to play hide,  go-seek with Freddie Goldhaber and his brother Michael, all of them from Bayport High School.

He graduated from SUNY -- Stony Brook with a Bachelor's degree in Physics in 1967.  He did theoretical low-temperature physics at the University of Minnesota, finishing in 1972.  In his own words: "My Ph.D. dissertation, which the Department Head, Dr. Morton Hamermesh, graciously agreed to chair when my advisor went south, was entitled (I had to retrieve it from the attic to find out) "The Beliaev-Zelivinsky Boson and Particle-Vibration Coupling Approximations Applied to the Exactly Soluble Pairing Plus Monopole Models," -- University of Minnesota, 1972.  Argh, what a title, although the subject was clean.  The group theory was one reason I left physics (no one to talk to except Mort), and later I realized I enjoyed helping society, so a field connected to engineering was more suitable for me.  In any case, someone told me I had uncovered the rotation group for 5 dimensions, although I did not confirm this."

From 5-dimensional rotations it was a short step to Tokyo where Nick joined a coastal engineeering group and worked from 1975 to 1984. Since 1984 he has been with the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg Mississippi as a scientist in coastal processes and shallow-water oceanography.  His Long Island roots clearly reappear in his work on "marine geomorphology," or the study of marine landforms and how the water shapes the coast.  In June, 1999, he co-chaired a technical specialty conference called “Coastal Sediments 99” which brought more than 300 geologists, oceanographers, and engineers from more than 30 countries to Ronkonkoma, just a short distance from his alma mater.   As a research scientist and technical area leader, he is responsible for $5 million annually in R&D at various institutions.     For example, he partially funds the web site "LIshore" which reports marine conditions at Shinnecock Inlet.  The site is maintained by Tom Wilson, an Electrical Engineer in the Marine Sciences Research Center at SUNY Stony Brook.  Nick is also supporting a Ph.D. student in the MSRC in the coming year and will be on his committee.  The dissertation is supervised by Henry Bokuniewicz.