Joshua Weitz

Joshua Weitz is a professor of biology and the Clark Leadership Chair in Data Analytics. The central focus of his research is to understand how viruses transform human and environmental health.

Weitz’s group develops theories and computational models of how viral infections transform human health and the fate of our planet. They collaborate with a global network of experimentalists, field-centered biologists and public health experts, striving to integrate models and data to advance the fundamental understanding of how living systems work and to inform actions that are driven by science.

An award-winning author who has published more than 140 peer-reviewed journal papers, Weitz also holds the Blaise Pascal Chair at the Institut de Biologie of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology.

Additionally, he was named a Simons Foundation Investigator in Theoretical Physics of Living Systems in 2023 and received the Royal Society of Biology’s Best Postgraduate Textbook Prize in 2016 and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface in 2007.

Before coming to UMD, he was a professor and the Tom and Marie Patton Chair of Biological Sciences as well as the founding director of the Quantitative Biosciences Graduate Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Weitz received his doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003.

Go here to view his academic publications on Google Scholar.