David S. Weiss is a bacterial physiologist and geneticist. His research group studies how bacteria remodel their cell walls during growth and division.

David grew up in northern California. He started his undergraduate studies at Deep Springs College, a small college (only 24 students!) located on a remote cattle and alfalfa ranch in the high desert of eastern California. After Deep Springs, David spent close to a year as an intern with the Sierra Club, where he worked on environmental issues related to management of public lands.

Next, David went to Swarthmore College, where he received a bachelor's degree in biology in 1985. It was at Swarthmore that David first became interested in microbiology, in part because of a summer spent at the Microbial Diversity course at Wood's Hole, Massachusetts. David did his graduate studies with Sydney Kustu at the University of California at Berkeley. His thesis work concerned how enteric bacteria regulate gene expression in response to nitrogen availability.

After receiving his Ph.D. in microbiology in 1991, David spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in Marburg, Germany, studying the energy metabolism of methanogenic Archaea with Rolf Thauer at the Max-Planck-Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology.

In 1994 David moved to Harvard Medical School, where he was a postdoctoral fellow with Jon Beckwith. It was at Harvard that David developed a research program concerning cell division in bacteria.

David's awards include an NSF graduate fellowship, and postdoctoral fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Max-Planck Society, and the Life Sciences Research Foundation.  In 2020 he received the 2020 Carver College of Medicine Faculty Service Award.

David teaches a graduate course in grant writing and an undergraduate course in Microbial Physiology.