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]
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]
^Weitz, Joshua (January 5, 2016). Quantitative Viral Ecology: Dynamics of Viruses and Their Microbial Hosts. Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0691161549.
