Dear Members of the HMS and HSDM Community:

It is with great pleasure that I announce the appointment of Dr. David D. Ginty, the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor of Neurobiology, as the next chair of the HMS Department of Neurobiology, effective Aug. 1.

He will succeed Dr. Michael Greenberg, the Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology, who announced last November that he would be stepping down after 14 years as chair. I want to thank Mike for his vision and leadership of the department, and for being a thoughtful and trusted advisor to countless colleagues, especially me. Mike’s brilliance as a scientist, a leader, and a mentor is woven into the fabric of HMS. I am pleased that he will continue as a valued member of the HMS faculty and the neurobiology department, where his lab studies the underlying basis of human brain developmental disorders linked to abnormalities in neural pathways and circuits.

David will become the seventh chair to lead the storied HMS Department of Neurobiology, which was founded in 1966 and was the first to introduce this new field of scientific discovery to the world. Today, the department includes 30 research laboratories that study neuroscience at the molecular, cellular, circuit, and systems levels, fueled by curiosity and a commitment to address diseases of the nervous system.

A Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, David brings a wealth of experience and achievement to the position. He is a distinguished member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the recipient of numerous research awards, including Columbia’s Alden Spencer Award, the Axelrod Prize from the Society for Neuroscience, and the Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience from MIT.

The focus of the Ginty Lab is to gain a greater understanding of the development, organization, and function of the peripheral nervous system and the spinal cord and brain circuits that underlie the sense of touch in health and disease. David received his PhD in physiology from East Carolina University in 1989 and did postdoctoral research on neuronal signaling mechanisms, first with John Wagner and then with Mike Greenberg at HMS. In 1995, he became a faculty member in the Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, returning to HMS in 2013 to join the Department of Neurobiology. Since then, David has served as associate director of the Harvard Program in Neuroscience and as a primary mentor to numerous graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at HMS who have gone on to independent faculty positions in academia or to industry.

Please join me in congratulating David on his new role. The department stands for excellence and inclusion in neuroscience research, training, and education, and I am confident that David will further strengthen and evolve what is arguably the nation’s, if not the world’s, preeminent Department of Neurobiology.

Sincerely,

George Q. Daley
Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
Harvard University