Leor Weinberger | |
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Born | 1975 Toronto, Canada |
Citizenship | United States |
Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley (PhD) Princeton University (Lewis Thomas Fellow) |
Known for | viral latency programs, Therapeutic Interfering Particles (TIPs), stochastic fluctuations/bet-hedging |
Awards | Pew Scholar Sloan Fellow Blavatnik Fellow Keck awardee TED speaker NIH Director's Pioneer Award NIH Director's New Innovator Award NIH Avant-Garde Award for HIV Research |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Virology, Synthetic Biology |
Institutions | University of California, San Francisco Gladstone Institutes |
Leor S. Weinberger is an American virologist and quantitative biologist. He is credited with discovering the HIV virus latency circuit, which provided the first experimental evidence that stochastic fluctuations ('noise') in gene expression are used for cell fate decisions.[1][2] He has also pioneered the concept of therapeutic interfering particles, or “TIPs”, which are resistance-proof antivirals.[3] His TED talk[4] on this novel antiviral approach 20 years in the making has been called a "highlight" [5] of TED and received a standing ovation from the live audience.
Weinberger is currently the William and Ute Bowes Distinguished Professor of Virology, director of the Gladstone Center for Cell Circuitry, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry, and professor of biochemistry and biophysics at Gladstone Institutes/University of California, San Francisco[6] He is the only person to ever win the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, NIH/NIDA Avant Garde Award, and NIH Director's New Innovator Award.[7][8][9]
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