Researcher

Jonathan Weissman

Profile

Jonathan Weissman is a Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Professor of Biology at MIT, recognized as one of the foremost cell biologists of his generation. He co-invented CRISPRi (CRISPR interference) and CRISPRa (CRISPR activation), genome-wide pooled CRISPR screening technology, and Perturb-seq — a method combining CRISPR perturbations with single-cell RNA-seq readout that has become an industry-standard platform for functional genomics. Weissman's earlier work resolved the chaperonin-mediated protein folding mechanism and characterized ribosome quality control pathways including no-go decay and non-stop decay. His lab's tools are now deployed across pharmaceutical and biotech companies worldwide to identify drug targets and understand gene function at scale. The Weissman laboratory is a major purchaser of genomic sequencing equipment, cell sorting instrumentation, high-throughput liquid handling robots, and computational infrastructure. He has published over 370 papers, holds more than a dozen patents, and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He received the NAS Award in Molecular Biology and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

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