Professor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Weiss began his pioneering work in synthetic biology in 1996 when, as a graduate student, he set up a wet-lab in the MIT EECS Department. His lab uses computer engineering principles of abstraction, composition, and interface specifications to program cells with sensors and actuators precisely controlled by analog and digital logic circuitry. His group constructed synthetic gene networks that implement biochemical logic circuits in E. coli fabricated using the AND, NOT, and IMPLIES logic gates. The Weiss group has also built analog circuits that perform signal processing to detect specific chemical gradients and generate pulses in response to cell-cell communication.