David
S. Weiss is a bacterial physiologist and geneticist. His research group
studies bacterial cell division.
David
grew up in northern California. He started his undergraduate studies
at Deep Springs College (http://www.deepsprings.edu),
a small college (only 24 students!) located on a remote cattle and alfalfa
ranch in the high desert of eastern California. After Deep Springs,
David spent close to a year as an intern with the Sierra Club, where
he worked on environmental issues related to management of public lands.
Next,
David went to Swarthmore College, where he received a bachelor's degree
in biology in 1985. It was at Swarthmore that David first became interested
in microbiology, in part because of a summer spent at the Microbial
Diversity course at Wood's Hole, Massachusetts. David did his graduate
studies with Sydney Kustu at the University of California at Berkeley.
His thesis work concerned how enteric bacteria regulate gene expression
in response to nitrogen availability.
After
receiving his Ph.D. in microbiology in 1991, David spent two years as
a postdoctoral fellow in Marburg, Germany, studying the energy metabolism
of methanogenic Archaea with Rolf Thauer at the Max-Planck-Institute
for Terrestrial Microbiology.
