Miriam Ginzberg
Helped build a way to read a signal's history from a single still image, then used it to catch mTORC1's fingerprint on Akt
PhD, Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School (Marc Kirschner lab) · Kafri Lab, Hospital for Sick Children / University of Toronto
Portrait: Kafri Lab, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)
Miriam Ginzberg earned her PhD in Marc Kirschner's lab in Harvard's Department of Systems Biology, where her dissertation examined how animal cells achieve uniform size — the same broad question of growth control her later work in Ran Kafri's lab returns to.
With Kafri, Ceryl Tan and Nish Patel, she co-developed AoF (Assay of Feedback), a method that reconstructs how a signal changes over time from ordinary fixed-cell snapshots, without perturbing the pathway. Applied to Akt phosphorylation, it uncovered a negative feedback loop confined to a narrow window at the G1/S transition — a signature the group traces, cautiously, to mTORC1/S6K1-dependent inhibition of IRS1.
Milestones in the Atlas
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | M | Inferring feedback regulation from static snapshots of a single signal GIN2026 Co-develops AoF, a perturbation-free single-cell imaging method that reads a signal's rate of change from still images, and uses it to uncover a narrow G1/S-restricted Akt feedback loop plausibly traced to mTORC1/S6K1. |