Associate Professor Joshua Weitz has published the first comprehensive book on quantitative viral biology. Quantitative Viral Ecology: Dynamics of Viruses and Their Microbial Hosts establishes a theoretical foundation for modeling and predicting the ecological and evolutionary dynamics that result from the interaction between viruses and their microbial hosts. These go well beyond the viruses we most often think of—influenza, HIV, and Ebola—and include the diverse and abundant viruses that infect single-celled microbes found in oceans, lakes, plants, soil, and animal-associated microbiomes.

Weitz's book addresses three major questions: What are viruses of microbes and what do they do to their hosts? How do interactions of a single virus-host pair affect the number and traits of hosts and virus populations? How do virus-host dynamics emerge in natural environments when interactions take place between many viruses and many hosts? Emphasizing how theory and models can provide answers, Weitz offers a cohesive framework for tackling new challenges in the study of viruses and microbes and how they are connected to ecological processes—from the laboratory to the Earth system.