Dr. Kratzke graduated from the University of Washington School of Medicine in 1983 and completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in 1986. Between 1986 and 1988, he did research at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the laboratory of Dr. Jeff Ross. He was a Medical Oncology Fellow at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health from 1988 to 1991, and stayed at the NCI doing research with Dr Frederick Kaye until 1994. From 1993 through 1994, Dr. Kratzke was also an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD. From 1994 to 2004, he was a Staff Physician at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center in the Section of Hematology/Oncology.  In 2004 he was appointed to the John Skoglund Chair in Lung Cancer Research.  He is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School.