Book by Joshua Weitz on Quantitative Viral Ecology Wins Award

Royal Society of Biology judged monograph as best postgraduate textbook in 2016

Quantitative Viral Ecology: Dynamics of Viruses and Their Microbial Hosts, by Joshua S. Weitz, has won the Postgraduate Textbook Prize of the Royal Society of Biology’s 2016 Book Awards. Weitz is a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences, the director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. His book was selected over three other finalists.

In selecting Weitz’s book, the judges wrote: “Beneath its unassuming plain green cover is a novel, readable and extensive scholarly work on viruses and their interactions. A superb introduction to [a] new field of research.”

Weitz’s book was published in December 2015 by Princeton University Press in their Monographs in Population Biology series.

The monograph 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?

Says Weitz: “The monograph emphasizes the ways in which theory and models can provide insights into all of these questions and provides a cohesive framework to the study of new challenges in the ongoing dynamics between viruses and their microbial hosts.”

In selecting the finalists for the postgraduate textbook category, judges were looking for books that were timely, coherent, accurate, and readable. The three other short-listed postgraduate textbooks published between May 1, 2015 and April 30, 2016 were:

•    Organism and Environment, by Sonia E Sultan, published by Oxford University Press;
•    Synthetic Biology - A Primer, by Paul S. Freemont, Richard I. Kitney, Geoff Baldwin, Travis Bayer, Robert Dickinson, Tom Ellis, Karen Polizzi, and Guy-Bart Stan, published by Imperial College Press; and  
•    The Origin of Higher Taxa, T. S, Kemp, published by Oxford University Press.