Prof. Weiss is one of the pioneers of synthetic biology. He has been engaged in synthetic biology research since 1996 when he was a graduate student with Tom Knight at MIT and where he helped set up a wet-lab focused on synthetic biology in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. After completion of his PhD in 2001, Weiss joined the faculty at Princeton University. He returned to MIT in 2009 to create and serve as the Director for the Synthetic Biology Center, and take on a tenured faculty position in the Department of Biological Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.