The Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology welcomes Dr. Leor Weinberger, who joined the institute on July 1 as an Associate Investigator and UCSF as an Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

Dr. Weinberger’s primary research focuses on fundamental principles of gene regulation, and more specifically the study of regulatory ‘master circuits’ that control HIV and human herpes viruses. His laboratory employs a coupled computational-experimental approach that relies on quantitative time-lapse fluorescence microscopy with mathematical modeling to study viral gene expression circuits and expression 'noise' at the single-cell level.

Dr. Weinberger earned his Bachelor’s of Science in 1998 at the University of Maryland, College Park and then spent a year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Department of Energy Scholar in the Theoretical Biophysics and Biology Group. In 2004 he received his PhD from UC Berkeley, where he was an HHMI Predoctoral Fellow. Dr. Weinberger then received postdoctoral training at Princeton University as a Lewis Thomas Fellow, working with Drs. Thomas Shenk and David Botstein. In 2007, Dr. Weinberger accepted an Assistant Professorship in Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego.

Since establishing his laboratory in 2007, Dr. Weinberger’s innovative research has been recognized by a number of prestigious organizations. Most recently, Dr. Weinberger was named a 2011 Sloan Research Fellow by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Other awards include the W.M. Keck Foundation Research Award, the California HIV/AIDS Young Investigator Innovative Development Award, a Bill and Melinda Gates Grand Challenges in Global Health Explorations Award, an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and a Pew Scholarship in Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Weinberger is also a member of the Society for Mathematical Biology, International Conference of Systems Biology, American Institute of Physics, American Chemical Society, and the American Association for Gene Therapy.

Warner Greene, GIVI’s Director, recently announced Dr. Weinberger’s selection and noted the search committee’s high enthusiasm for his candidacy. “Dr. Weinberger will certainly bring a new and exciting dimension to GIVI and we very much look forward to him joining our faculty.”