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Investigating how viruses impact human health and the fate of our planet.

Viruses are small, ubiquitous, and critical to ecosystem health and function. Nearly every habitat, whether soils, lakes, oceans, or our gut, is teeming with viruses. Viruses infect organisms across all kingdoms of life. Sometimes, these infections can be devastating and reshape the fate of hosts and populations. In other circumstances, viral infections can actually have benefits to the infected host, e.g., through the transfer of beneficial genes or by protecting the infected host from infection by even more virulent viruses. Our research group studies virus-host interactions, trying to understand how the impacts of viral infections on individuals scales up to transform the populations, communities, and ecosystems. 

Our team includes quantitative biologists, computational ecologists, physicists, engineers, and bioinformaticians working on our five major research themes. Primarily theoretical/computational in nature, our work utilizes the tools of nonlinear dynamics, stochastic processes, and large-scale data analysis. Some of our recent and ongoing projects include studies of the dynamics of complex viral-host communities, the spread and control of Covid-19, control approaches to improving phage treatment of multi-drug resistant pathogens, and the link between game theory and strategic behavior of viruses and microbes.

 

Foundations of Quantitative Viral Ecology

Ongoing work aims to understand virus-host interactions across a continuum from lysis to latency, including:

  • Cell-centric measures of viral fitness
  • Coevolutionary dynamics of viruses and bacteria
  • Linking individual infection outcomes to population and ecosystem dynamics.

Foundations of Quantitative Viral Ecology

Ongoing work aims to understand virus-host interactions across a continuum from lysis to latency, including:

  • Cell-centric measures of viral fitness
  • Coevolutionary dynamics of viruses and bacteria
  • Linking individual infection outcomes to population and ecosystem dynamics

Microbial Ecology & Evolution

The nonlinear interactions between individual microbes, particularly in complex, diverse communities, can give rise to emergent phenomena, unexpected when analyzing the system at the individual scale. Some of the projects we currently work on include:

  • Emergence of spatial patterns arising from microbial growth dynamics
  • Dynamics of microbial dormancy and bet-hedging
  • Multi-trophic interactions between microbes and eukaryotic antagonists

Viral Ecology of Marine Systems

We are working on several projects to understand how virus-microbe interactions shape the biogeochemical cycles of one of the largest habitats on Earth. Current projects include:

  • Assessing top-down control of marine microbes by viruses
  • Linking abiotic factors to virus-microbe dynamics in a changing climate
  • Exploring the influence of non-lytic interactions on virus-microbe dynamics

Advancing Bacteriophage Therapy

We are working on multiple projects to develop quantitative models to account for the system-level interactions between bacteria, phage, and antibiotics. Ongoing projects include:

  • Immunophage synergy and tripartite dynamics arising from interactions between MDR pathogens, phage, and the innate immune system
  • Models of combination phage and antibiotic therapy
  • Phage interactions with bacterial biofilms

Infectious Disease Dynamics

Over the past 10 years, our team has worked on problems related to exploring non-canonical epidemic dynamics, including dynamics of transmission associated with environmental routes (e.g., as in cholera), identifiability problems (e.g, as in Ebola virus disease), and the link between behavior and transmission. Since January 2020, we have initiated a large-scale, collaborative effort to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. Some projects we are currently working on include:

  • Characterizing the impact of asymptomatic transmission on spread
  • Assessing the link between behavior and transmission
  • Evaluating the use of virus and serological testing as mitigation, in theory and in practice
  • Estimating risk of transmission associated with large events

Plant Networks (inactive)

The Weitz Group has led multiple projects to improve the characterization of the physical structure of plant networks across scales, linking structure with function and uncovering the underlying principles of growth whenever possible.