Team:GeorgiaTech/Team

Dr. Joshua Weitz is a quantitative biologist interested in the structure and dynamics of complex biological systems.  He received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 2003 and was a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University from 2003-2006.  Dr. Weitz joined Georgia Tech in 2007 where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Biology with courtesy appointments in Physics and Bioengineering.  Dr. Weitz is the recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface and is funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, NSF, and DARPA.  His research group includes ecologists, mathematicians, physicists and bioinformaticians working on four major research themes: (i) viral dynamics at the molecular, population and evolutionary scales; (ii) quantitative systems biology and bioinformatics; (iii) structure and function of vascular networks; (iv) theoretical ecology and epidemiology. The work in the Weitz group is primarily theoretical in nature, and utilizes the tools of nonlinear dynamics, stochastic processes, and large-scale data analysis to interact with experimentalists. Examples of recent and ongoing projects include studies of collective decision making in bacterial viruses, robustness and fragility of gene regulatory networks to copy number variation, unsupervised approaches to binning short environmental sequence fragments, network phenotyping and classification of root system architecture, and a Hierarchical Bayesian analysis of allometric scaling models in biology.

Dr. Eric Gaucher exploits a multidisciplinary approach towards research to generate an 'evolutionary synthetic biology'. This combination of molecular evolution and biomedicine provides a better understanding of basic molecular processes while simultaneously generating biomolecules useful for industrial and therapeutic purposes. Dr. Gaucher received his Ph.D. in 2001 and then worked for NASA until 2003 studying the Origins and Evolution of Early Life. He was then Researcher/President of a non-profit research organization until 2008 at which time he accepted an Associate Professor position at the Georgia Institute of Technology.