A Pioneer in Coronavirus Research

At the ongoing American Society for Microbiology (ASM) conference, Susan Weiss, PhD, co-director for the Penn Center for Research on Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Pathogens has become the recipient of the 2025 ASM Lifetime Achievement Award for her work.

The ASM Lifetime Achievement Award is given annually to honorees for their sustained contributions and service to the microbiological sciences, according to ASM. It recognizes individuals with significant contributions and respected standing within the field.¹

“It feels really incredible, particularly because I'm a coronavirologist, and our field was sort of not recognized very much or not appreciated for the first 40 years that I worked on it. So, it's gratifying to receive this award,” Weiss said.

Weiss began studying coronaviruses during her postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco.² At the time, very little was known about the impact of coronaviruses, other than that they can cause the common cold in humans.³

“I was a post-doctoral fellow working on retroviruses in a very high profile lab with Mike Bishop and Harold Varmus. And when it came time for me to look for a job, I realized I didn't want to do retroviruses anymore, so I looked for something new. I wanted to work in infectious diseases, and I came upon coronaviruses just by looking through the Journal of Virology. And it looked like a field just ready for the picking, because we knew a little bit about these viruses—how they had a very unusual way to replicate—and we knew that there were some really interesting animal models, particularly for the model coronavirus, mass hepatitis virus. So it was both the biology and the pathogenesis, and really a wide open field with very few people working in it that appealed to me to start my new lab.”

She was a pioneer starting her own laboratory in this area of study in 1980 at the University of Pennsylvania. And in 2020, she became the co-director of the Penn Center for Research on Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Pathogens. Her team’s research is focused around the biology of coronaviruses, including SARS, MERS and SARS-CoV-2.⁴

She also acknowledges that back then people could focus on basic science and there was not as much a focus on translational science.

In March 2020, and just when the pandemic was taking hold in the US, Weiss was awarded certification from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to work with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.⁴

In terms of thinking about coronaviruses today, Weiss mentions a few different concerns she has about them.

“A really big one is MERS Coronavirus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome virus. It's something like a majority of camels in the Middle East and also in parts of Africa, have seroconverted,” Weiss said. They've been exposed to MERS Coronavirus. And there's lots of different coronaviruses in the camels, and they can recombine. So I do worry about of coronavirus spillover from camels into humans. It's happened before, and it continues to happen at a very low level in the Middle East and in Africa. The strains are a little different, so they haven't spilled over much or not noticeably…I also worry about SARS-like viruses in bats, and the spillovers are not common, but they can happen.”

In terms of her career, she credits having great mentors and finding something she was really interested in that helped propel her and sustain her life’s work.

In reflecting on a lifetime of work and thinking about the future, Weiss has serious concerns around the future of federal funding and the foundation of basic science research.

“The diminishing of funding from the government is really an issue, particularly for basic science,” Weiss said. “There's a lot of funding for vaccines and for antivirals that can come from industry, but there's really very little funding to do the basic kind of work that that we do in our lab, so that's a huge challenge. I think that students are tending not to do academic careers…we're going to have a smaller number of post-doctoral fellows. So the whole system is getting shaken up a bit, and I don't know how it's going to land.”

References

1. ASM Lifetime Achievement Award. ASM. Accessed June 21, 2025.
https://asm.org/academy/asm-lifetime-achievement-award
2.vKoop J. Penn microbiologist explains why some coronaviruses are more deadly than others. PhillyVoice. March 26, 2020. Accessed June 21, 2025.
3. Salata, Cristiano; Calistri, Arianna; Parolin, Cristina; Palù, Giorgio (2019-12-01). "Coronaviruses: a paradigm of new emerging zoonotic diseases". Pathogens and Disease. 77 (9). doi:10.1093/femspd/ftaa006
4. As many labs go quiet, research to find a coronavirus therapy ramps up. Penn Today. March 31, 2020. Accessed June 21, 2025.
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/many-labs-go-quiet-research-find-coronavirus-therapy-ramps