Dr. Joshua Weinstein

Biography

Joshua Weinstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago, specializing in biophysics and molecular technologies. His research focuses on the development of DNA-based technologies for high-throughput encoding and decoding of biological information with applications across biology and medicine. Previously, he applied massively parallel DNA sequencing to study immune receptor repertoires and invented DNA microscopy—a novel imaging modality that uses DNA instead of light as an imaging medium to create detailed pictures of genetic diversity present in biological specimens. Weinstein completed his undergraduate studies in physics and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania and obtained his PhD in biophysics from Stanford University in 2012 under the mentorship of Stephen Quake and Daniel Fisher. He has published work on immune receptor sequence repertoires using zebrafish as a model organism and has contributed to the fields of immune development and human vaccine response. His postdoctoral work was conducted at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard under the joint mentorship of Feng Zhang and Aviv Regev, supported by the Simons Fellowship in the Life Sciences Research Foundation. Notably, Weinstein's work on DNA microscopy allows biological specimens to 'image themselves', producing comprehensive spatio-genetic datasets without the need for specialized equipment. He has authored several influential publications in leading scientific journals, significantly advancing the understanding of spatial transcriptomic imaging and genetic measurement.

Research Interests

Experience