Joshua Weitz

About

Joshua Weitz is a Professor and Clark Leadership Chair in Data Analytics at the University of Maryland, within the Department of Biology. His research centrally focuses on understanding how viruses influence human and environmental health. His group develops theories and computational models to study how viral infections affect the fates of individuals, populations, and communities, as well as their impact on ecosystem-scale functions. Weitz collaborates with a global network of experimentalists, field biologists, and public health experts to integrate models and data, aiming to advance fundamental understanding of living systems and inform science-driven actions. His research efforts are broadly organized around viruses of microbes, known as virus ecology, and viruses of humans, referred to as infectious disease dynamics. His team is interdisciplinary, including bioscientists, physicists, mathematicians, and biologists. Since joining the University of Maryland research community in Summer 2023, Weitz has actively sought to deepen understanding of viral spread principles and their applications to areas such as phage therapy, marine ecosystems, microbial ecology and evolution, and infectious disease dynamics. His ongoing and planned research initiatives in Quantitative Viral Dynamics encompass foundational viral ecology, marine viral impacts, bacteriophage therapy, microbial ecology and evolution, and infectious disease dynamics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Medicine
• Econometrics
• Environmental health
• Economics
• Data science
• Physics
• Geography
• Demography

Selected publications

• Modeling shield immunity to reduce COVID-19 epidemic spread

  Nature Medicine · 2020-05-07 · 260 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The time scale of asymptomatic transmission affects estimates of epidemic potential in the COVID-19 outbreak

  Epidemics · 2020-05-11 · 172 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The role of asymptomatic carriers in transmission poses challenges for control of the COVID-19 pandemic. Study of asymptomatic transmission and implications for surveillance and disease burden are ongoing, but there has been little study of the implications of asymptomatic transmission on dynamics of disease. We use a mathematical framework to evaluate expected effects of asymptomatic transmission on the basic reproduction number R0 (i.e., the expected number of secondary cases generated by an a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Macrophage-induced reduction of bacteriophage density limits the efficacy of in vivo pulmonary phage therapy

  Nature Communications · 2025-07-01 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access

  The rise of antimicrobial resistance leads to renewed interest in evaluating phage therapy. In murine models highly effective treatment of acute pneumonia caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa relies on the synergistic antibacterial activity of bacteriophages with neutrophils. Here, we show that depletion of alveolar macrophages (AM) shortens the survival of adult male mice without boosting the P. aeruginosa load in the lungs. Unexpectedly, upon bacteriophage treatment, pulmonary levels of P. aerugin…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• NIH indirect cost cuts will affect the economy and employment

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2025-06-02 · 3 citations

  letterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Phase separation and coexistence in spatial coordination games between microbes

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-09-09 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Dense, microbial communities are shaped by local interactions between cells. Both the nature of interactions, spanning antagonistic to cooperative, and the strength of interactions vary between and across microbial species and strains. These local interactions can influence the emergence and maintenance of microbial diversity. However, it remains challenging to link features of local interactions with spatially mediated coexistence dynamics given the significant variation in the microscopic mech…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Inferring Cellular Lysis and Regeneration of Organic Matter by Marine Viruses

  NSF · $337k · 2018–2023

• Synergistic control of acute respiratory pathogens by bacteriophage and the innate immune response

  NIH · $1.9M · 2019–2025

• Collaborative Research: RAPID: Integrative Modeling of Intervention Serology and the Role of Shield Immunity in Reducing COVID-19 Epidemic Spread

  NSF · $99k · 2020–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Jonathan Dushoff

  McMaster University

  51 shared

• Stephen J. Beckett

  University of Maryland, College Park

  41 shared

• Bryan T. Grenfell

  Princeton Public Schools

  38 shared

• David Demory

  Sorbonne Université

  36 shared

• Rogelio A. Rodriguez-Gonzalez

  Quantitative BioSciences

  36 shared

• Laurent Debarbieux

  Université Paris Cité

  35 shared

• Sang Woo Park

  Princeton University

  31 shared

• Daniel Muratore

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  27 shared

Awards & honors

• Simons Foundation Investigator in Theoretical Physics of Liv…
• Chaire Blaise Pascal, Institut de Biologie of the ENS, Paris…
• Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, 2019
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sc…
• Best Postgraduate Textbook Prize Awarded by the Royal Societ…

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