Pamela Ann Silver is an American biologist, bioengineer, and professor. She has the title of Elliot T. and Onie H. Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Systems Biology. Silver is one of the founding Core Faculty Members of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
She has contributed to the fields of cell and nuclear biology, systems biology, RNA biology, cancer therapeutics, international policy research, and graduate education. Silver was the first director of the Harvard University Graduate Program in Systems Biology. She is a member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity.
Early life and education
Silver was born in Atherton, California, and attended Laurel and Encinal Elementary Schools. During this time, she won the IBM Math Competition, which awarded her a slide rule, and was noted for her early skill in science. She later attended Menlo-Atherton High School and graduated from Castilleja School in Palo Alto. Silver earned her B.A. in chemistry from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1982. Her Ph.D. research took place in the laboratory of William T. Wickner and focused mainly on the coat assembly of the M13 coliphage.
Career
Silver completed her postdoctoral work with Mark Ptashne at Harvard University, where she identified one of the first nuclear localization sequences. She continued researching nuclear localization in her own lab as an assistant professor at Princeton University. During this time, she studied the receptor for NLSs and discovered one of the first eukaryotic DnaJ chaperones.
Silver continued her work in Cell Biology when she joined the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, holding the Claudia Adams Barr Investigatorship and becoming an associate professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber. During this period, she was among the first scientists to track GFP-tagged proteins in living cells. She also began early studies in systems biology to examine interactions within the nucleus across the entire genome. Alongside Bill Sellers, she discovered molecules that block nuclear export, which led to the creation of a publicly traded company called Karyopharm Therapeutics. In 1997, she was promoted to professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber.
In 2004, Silver joined the newly formed Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School as a professor. Around this time, she collaborated with the Synthetic Biology Working Group at MIT and decided to shift her research group’s focus to synthetic biology. She studied the movement of carbon-fixing organelles in photosynthetic bacteria. She has worked extensively on designing modified bacteria to act as sensors for drug exposure or inflammation in the mammalian gut. She has also served as the director of an ARPA-E (DOE) project on electrofuels.
Her former students include Christina Agapakis, Valerie Weiss, Karmella Haynes, Jessica Polka, and Anita Corbett.
Research
Dr. Silver has worked on modifying mammalian cells to help them remember and report past contact with drugs and radiation. She has also designed strong computational systems in embryonic stem cells and bacteria, as well as created synthetic switches that control gene silencing by using new types of therapeutic proteins. Her research helps create new treatments for both humans and animals.
Dr. Silver studied the carboxysome, which is a key structure in cyanobacteria that helps fix carbon. Her work improves how efficiently these bacteria perform photosynthesis and capture carbon. She also modified cyanobacteria to better convert carbon into valuable products and showed that these bacteria can form stable communities. In a project with Jessica Polka, she used a special microscope to examine the β-carboxysome in detail.
Dr. Silver worked with Daniel Nocera at Harvard University to create a device called the "Bionic Leaf." This device uses solar energy to produce fuel by splitting water with a system that combines chemical and biological methods, using bacteria that have been modified for this purpose.
Dr. Silver found a connection between how materials move in and out of a cell’s nucleus and how genes are controlled. She discovered the first arginine methyltransferase, a protein involved in how chromosomes function and how RNA-binding proteins move between the nucleus and the rest of the cell. She also identified differences in ribosomes that led her to suggest a new way ribosomes match with messenger RNA (mRNA) during protein production. Her findings help scientists better understand how gene regulation influences diseases like cancer.
Awards and honors
Dr. Silver has received many important awards and honors. These include the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Basil O’Connor Research Scholar Award from the March of Dimes, the American Heart Association Established Investigator Award, the NIH Directors Lecture, the NIH MERIT Award, the Innovation Award at BIO, the title of Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Elliot T. and Onie H. Adams Professorship at Harvard Medical School, and being named one of the Top 20 Global Synthetic Biology Influencers. She serves on multiple advisory boards and has spoken to members of the US Congress.
Dr. Silver was given the BBS Mentoring Award for Graduate Education at Harvard Medical School. She is one of the founders of the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition, known as iGEM, and currently serves on the Board of iGEM.org. She started and was the first director of the Harvard University Graduate Program in Systems Biology. In 2017, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.