Joshua Weitz

Joshua S. Weitz is an American biologist. He is both a professor of biology and the Clark Leadership Chair in Data Analytics at the University of Maryland.^[1] Previously, he was a professor at Georgia Tech,^[2] where he was the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences.^[3] In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.^[4]

Education

He earned his A.B at Princeton University in 1997 and his Ph.D. in physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003.^[5]

Research

Weitz's interests are the dynamics and structure of complex biology systems.^[5] In particular, Joshua Weitz's research focuses on the quantitative evaluation of virus-host interactions. The quantitative edge that he brought to the field is summarized in the award winning book Quantitative Viral Ecology,^[6] which won the 2016 Postgraduate Textbook Prize awarded by the Royal Society of Biology.^[7]

While in graduate school, he co-authored a widely cited paper, Re-examination of the “3/4-law” of Metabolism, published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.^[8] As a post-doctoral scholar, he published Coevolutionary arms races between bacteria and bacteriophage in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.^[9] His notable more recent publications include Statistical structure of host–phage interactions, PNAS (2011),^[10] Ocean viruses and their effects on microbial communities and biogeochemical cycles, F1000 Bio. Rep. (2012),^[11] Viral tagging reveals discrete populations in Synechococcus viral genome sequence space, Nature (2014),^[12] and An oscillating tragedy of the commons in replicator dynamics with game-environment feedback, PNAS (2016).^[13]

Other Activities

Weitz has published poetry, including a book of poems he wrote in college, Between Two Stones.^[14] He has also been politically active, writing in the Chronicle for Higher Education about advocating for science,^[15] and speaking at the Atlanta March for Science.^[16]