Investigating how viruses transform human health and the fate of our planet.
Investigating how viruses transform human health and the fate of our planet.
Investigating how viruses transform human health and the fate of our planet.
The Predictive Biology Hub for Human and Environmental Health (PBH) officially launched at the University of Maryland on September 9, 2026. PBH leaders, co-principal investigators, graduate students, and prospective collaborators gathered for an afternoon of discussion about the Hub’s research initiatives. Presenters representing departments across campus, including mathematics, physics, geography, biology, and global health, shared […]
The Weitz group continues to grow, and we are excited to welcome Dr. Spencer Hobson-Gutierrez, a Quantitative Biology Initiative postdoctoral fellow. Spencer comes to us from New York University, where he received his PhD in Theoretical Biology. He also holds an MS in Mathematics and a dual BS in Pure Mathematics and Physics from Kansas […]
New collaborative preprint on the risk and interpretation of ‘breakthrough infections’ amidst declining childhood vaccination rates and a sustained, national measles epidemic, co-led with Mallory Harris in collaboration with Akash Arani, Tapan Goel, Kejia Zhang, Stephen Beckett, Nathan Lo and Jonathan Dushoff. Conventional epidemic theory assumes that individuals mix at random – leveraging this simplification […]
Our recent published work on impacts of enhanced viral lysis on marine ecosystems, led by biologists Naomi Gilbert and Daniel Muratore, has been highlighted by several news outlets, including ‘The Conversation‘ and AAAS’s EurekAlert.
Joshua Weitz writes about his insights that he and his collaborative team gained from the collaborative SCIMaP project in this STAT opinion article. A quantitative measure of scientific output (or the lack thereof) is commonly hard to estimate. SCIMaP has helped to bring some clarity.
Raunak Dey, a physics graduate student in the group, was featured on UMD’s news page of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. “Some viruses can be useful, and some viruses can be harmful,” Dey said in this article. “The beauty of it is that the knowledge you learn from these model systems can […]
Joshua Weitz received a new award from ‘Open Philanthropy’ to engage in collaborative work with University of Pennsylvania and Georgia Tech. The team will develop an interactive, data-driven map to visualize and communicate the economic impacts of proposed cuts to federal funding for scientific and medical research. Read more in this CMNS news article.
A new paper co-authored by Akash Arani (co-first author) and Prof. Joshua Weitz has been published in The ISME Journal. The study, titled “Episomal virus maintenance enables bacterial population recovery from infection and promotes virus–bacterial coexistence,” combines experimental and mathematical analyses to examine coexistence between Salinibacter ruber, a hypersaline bacterium, and its virus EM1. In […]
A new paper authored by Tapan Goel, along with Stephen Beckett and Prof. Joshua Weitz, has been published in Virus Evolution. The study, titled “Eco-evolutionary dynamics of temperate phages in periodic environments,” uses non-linear differential equations to simulate how temperate viruses evolve in response to periodic fluctuations in the environment. The paper sheds light on […]