Pamela A. Silver
Harvard University
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Primary Section: 22, Cellular and Developmental Biology Secondary Section: 21, Biochemistry Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2023)
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Biosketch
Pamela Silver is the Elliot T. and Onie H. Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. She is also a Core Founding Faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. She earned her BA in Chemistry at the University of California at Santa Cruz and her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of California at Los Angeles. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Biology at Harvard University, an Assistant Professor at Princeton University, followed by appointment to Full Professor in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute prior to joining the Department of Systems Biology. She was the first Director of the Graduate Program in Systems Biology at Harvard University. She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the NAS. She is member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity.
Research Interests
Pamela Silver’s Synthetic Biology laboratory seeks to use design principles from Nature to solve real world problems. Major interest areas are therapeutic discovery and design, reprogramming cell systems and sustainability. They have created cells that act as sensors of their environment, memory devices and bio-computers, register anti-viral therapeutics, and produce commodities from sustainable sources. They have re-engineered gut microbes to act as sensors and living therapeutics. The group contributes to development at the interface of living cells and electrochemistry for applications for sustainable production and agriculture. And they have designed novel proteins to target disease states and to prolong cell life under extreme conditions.
