The Waksman Institute of Microbiology is a research facility on the Busch Campus of Rutgers University. It is named after Selman Waksman, a student and then faculty member at Rutgers who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1952 for research which led to the discovery of streptomycin. The Nobel Prize is on display in the lobby of the institute. The institute conducts research on microbial molecular genetics, developmental molecular genetics, plant molecular genetics, and structural and computational biology.
In 2019, Dr. Kenneth D. Irvine was appointed as Interim Director of the Waksman Institute. Dr. Irvine has been a member of the Waksman Institute since 1995 and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and Director of the Rutgers Graduate Program in Cell and Developmental Biology. He was selected by his peers after the untimely passing of the Institute's fourth director, Joachim Messing.