Student From Encino Named Rhodes Scholar

A 21-year-old college student from Encino and former scholar-athlete at Harvard-Westlake School is one of 32 Americans chosen to be next year’s Rhodes Scholars.

Jordan Krall, a chemistry major at Amherst College, is writing his senior thesis on creating a synthetic protein that will block replication of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Krall, a varsity baseball player for Amherst, foreshadowed his academic and athletic prowess while a student at Harvard-Westlake. He was a standout high school pitcher and shortstop, with a .321 batting average his senior year. At Amherst, he plays shortstop.

In the summer following his 1997 graduation from Harvard-Westlake, Krall represented the United States at the International Chemistry Olympiad and earned a silver medal.

At Amherst, Krall was awarded the 1997-98 Bassett Physics Prize for outstanding achievement in physics by a freshman or sophomore and conducted summer chemistry research at Caltech. He was a Goldwater Scholar during his sophomore and junior years and won the college’s 2000 David R. Belevetz Memorial Fund Prize for work on an honors thesis in chemistry, according to the college.

Krall’s mother said her son was speechless upon winning the prestigious award. “It’s just something that you can’t really expect,” said Shelley Krall of Encino. She and her husband, investment banker Michael Krall, were “very, very excited” for their son, she said. The Kralls have two other children, 17-year-old twins Abby and Jake.

Rhodes Scholarships, created in 1902 by the will of the British statesman Cecil Rhodes, provide for graduate study at Oxford University in England.

Jordan Krall plans to study synthetic chemistry at Oxford next year.