David Ginty
David D. Ginty (born 1962) is an American neuroscientist and developmental biologist. He earned a Ph.D. in physiology from East Carolina University, researching how polyamines regulate cell growth. He did postdoctoral work with John Wagner at Dana–Farber/Harvard and with Michael Greenberg at Harvard Medical School, studying signal transduction and growth factor signaling in neurons.
In 1995 he joined Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as a faculty member in the Department of Neuroscience, after being invited by Solomon Snyder. He became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2000 and stayed at Johns Hopkins for 18 years. In 2013 he moved to Harvard Medical School in Boston as the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor of Neurobiology, while continuing as an HHMI investigator.
His research at Hopkins helped reveal how neuronal growth factors and axon guidance cues work and how neural circuits controlling autonomic functions and the sense of touch are assembled. At Harvard, his lab uses genetics, circuit mapping and electrophysiology to understand the development and function of touch-related neural circuits, focusing on low-threshold mechanosensory neurons (LTMRs) and the spinal circuits that convey touch signals to the brain.
Awards and honors include the Klingenstein Award, Pew Biomedical Scholar Award, Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar Award, and the NIH Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 06:49 (CET).