Faculty Profile


Joshua Weinstein
Section of Genetic Medicine
Assistant Professor of Medicine
jaweinst@uchicago.edu

Academic Interests

Dr. Weinstein is a biophysicist and molecular technologist. He works on developing DNA-based technologies for high-throughput encoding and decoding of biological information with a view toward applications in biology and medicine. He has previously worked on applying massively parallel DNA sequencing to the study of immune receptor repertoires. Recently, he invented DNA microscopy, an imaging modality that uses DNA rather than light as an imaging medium in order to generate detailed pictures of how genetic diversity distributes spatially across biological specimens. Dr. Weinstein’s group develops new modalities of biological measurement, drawing from tools in molecular biology, physics, and applied mathematics. The group builds on the premise that technological mastery of DNA synthesis, manipulation, and sequence-readout over the past few decades provides fundamentally new opportunities to deepen our understanding and command of the microscopic world. Dr.Weinstein completed his undergraduate studies in physics and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, and his PhD in biophysics at Stanford University in 2012 under the direction of Professors Stephen Quake and Daniel Fisher. There, he published the first global measurements of immune receptor sequence repertoires, using the zebrafish as a model organism. Weinstein later applied repertoire-sequencing to immune development and human vaccine response. He completed his postdoctoral work at the Broad Institute/MIT, under the joint-mentorship of Professors Feng Zhang and Aviv Regev, where he was supported by a Simons Fellowship from the Life Sciences Research Foundation. There, he developed DNA microscopy, enabling biological specimens to “image themselves” and thereby generating detailed spatio-genetic data sets, which bypass the need for specialized equipment.
 

Clinical Interests

 

Publications

For a complete list of publications click here:

Training

  • PhD, 2012, Stanford University, Biophysics
  • Postdoctoral Associate, 2019, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard