Secretary

Nathan Weyand is an Associate Professor in the Biological Sciences Department at Ohio University. He trained in the laboratories of Dr. Magdalene So and Dr. David A. Low. He has worked as a bacteriologist and cellular microbiologist since the 1990s and focused on Neisseria gonorrhoeae epithelial infection models. Dr. Weyand is working to understand the contribution of membrane-associated complement inhibitors to immune evasion strategies used by N. gonorrhoeae. As host restriction severely limits in vivo studies of pathogenic Neisseria species, he has been developing long-term pharyngeal persistence models in macaques and mice. These efforts aim to model asymptomatic carriage by pathogenic species and study conserved factors contributing to pharyngeal colonization, dissemination, and transmission. He is also working to understand how antimicrobial resistance loci influence pharyngeal persistence. Nathan teaches undergraduate and graduate students about general microbiology and gene regulation. He began serving as Ohio University’s Molecular & Cellular Biology Graduate Program director in the fall of 2023. Nathan likes imaging microbial colonies. Some of his pictures can be found on Instagram @germchaser