Harvard Medical School as a Professor. Around this time, she worked closely with the Synthetic Biology Working Group at MIT and made the decision to move her research group into Synthetic Biology. She observed the motion of the carbon fixing organelles in photosynthetic bacteria. She has worked extensively on designing modified bacteria to act as sensors for exposure to a drug or inflammation in the mammalian gut. She has served as the Director of an ARPA-E (DOE) project on electrofuels. Synthetic Biology Some of Silver's work in this area includes the engineering of: mammalian cells to remember and report past exposures to drugs and radiation, robust computational circuits in embryonic stem cells and bacteria, and synthetic switches to moderate gene silencing with the integration of novel therapeutic proteins. Silver's work sets the stage for the development of novel therapies for use in both humans and animals. Carbon fixation and sustainability Silver has characterized the carboxysome – the major carbon-fixing structure in cyanobacteria – to enhance photosynthetic efficiency and carbon fixation. She has also engineered cyanobacteria to more efficiently cycle carbon into high-value commodities and has shown that these bacteria can form sustainable consortia. In a collaboration with Jessica Polka, Silver performed super-resolution microscopy of the β-carboxysome. Silver collaborated with Daniel Nocera at Harvard University to develop a device, called the "Bionic Leaf", that converts solar energy into fuel through a hybrid water-splitting catalyst system that leverages metabolically engineered bacteria. Gene regulation Silver discovered a correlation between nuclear transport and gene regulation – she identified the first arginine methyltransferase, which plays a role in chromatin function and is important to the movement of RNA binding proteins between the nucleus and cytoplasm of cells. She also discovered previously unknown variations among ribosomes that led her to propose a unique specificity for the matching between ribosomes and the subsequent translation of mRNAs. Silver's finding has several implications for our understanding of how gene regulation impacts disease development, such as cancer. Awards Silver has been the recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, a Basil O’Connor Research Scholar of the March of Dimes, an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association, the NIH Directors Lecture, and NIH MERIT award, Innovation award at BIO, a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Elliot T. and Onie H. Adams Professorship at Harvard Medical School and named the Top 20 Global Synthetic Biology Influencers.