The Weitz Group is thrilled to announce that Marian Dominguez-Mirazo has successfully passed her thesis defense and has earned a Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences from the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. Her dissertation, “Impact of Latent Period Variability on Viral Dynamics,” offers new insight into how natural variation in phage infection timing influences viral fitness and microbial population outcomes.

Rather than treating viral life-history traits as uniform, Marian’s work shows how heterogeneity, especially in the latent period between infection and cell lysis, can drive profound changes in virus-host interactions. Using a combination of theoretical models and experimental validation, she developed a framework to infer and interpret this variability, laying the groundwork for more accurate predictions of viral dynamics in complex microbial communities. Her research opens new directions for understanding how phages shape ecosystem function and offers tools for connecting single-cell variability to ecosystem-scale processes.

Next up, Marian will be heading to Montpellier, France, to pursue her postdoctoral research. Congratulations, Dr. Dominguez-Mirazo, we can’t wait to see what comes next!