He is a recipient of the U.S. Army Research Office Young Investigator Award and the Dean’s Faculty Fellowship from the College of Engineering and Applied Science. He earned his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the UK Medical Research Council Centre for Protein Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Kaar joined the CU Boulder faculty in 2010 and earned the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2015.