Shira Weingarten-Gababy, Ph.D.

Dr. Weingarten-Gabbay is an Assistant Professor of Microbiology at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She completed her BSc in Medical Sciences at the Hebrew University, her MSc in the department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute, and her PhD in the Department of Computer Science & Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute as a Clore scholar. After graduating, she joined the laboratories of Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute and Charlie Rice at the Rockefeller University to pursue postdoctoral research in virology. In 2025, she launched the Laboratory of Systems Virology at Harvard Medical School.

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Throughout her career, Dr. Weingarten-Gabbay has pioneered high-throughput techniques to interrogate the intricate code embedded within human and viral genomes. As a graduate student, she developed Massively Parallel Reporter Assays (MPRAs) to unravel the mechanisms underlying the recruitment of ribosomes to mRNAs and to decipher the architecture of human promoters. As a postdoctoral fellow, she established Massively Parallel Ribosome Profiling (MPRP) technique leading to the revelation of thousands of unannotated microproteins across nearly 700 viruses. She uncovered a surprising role for these “hidden” microproteins in T cell recognition, with some eliciting stronger responses than canonical viral proteins, and demonstrated striking differences in the viral antigens recognized by helper versus killer T cells.

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Dr. Weingarten-Gabbay is the recipient of the Blavatnik Regional Award; the RNA Society Award for Innovation in High-Throughput Biology; the Broad Ignite Award; the Eric S. Lander Prize in Scientific Excellence; and postdoctoral fellowships from HFSP, EMBO, the Gruss-Lipper Foundation, the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program, and the Rothschild Foundation. She was named one of Globes magazine’s 40 Under 40, recognizing Israel’s most promising young people.

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In 2020, Dr. Weingarten-Gabbay co-founded the international Systems Virology Journal Club, which brings together researchers interested in fundamental questions in virology and introduces new methodologies and concepts in the field.

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