Pamela A. Silver is an American cell and systems biologist and a bioengineer. She holds the Elliot T. and Onie H. Adams Professorship 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 made contributions to other disciplines including 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. Education and early life Silver grew up in Atherton, California, where she attended Laurel and Encinal Elementary Schools. During this time, she was a winner of the IBM Math Competition, winning a slide rule and received special recognition for her early aptitude in science. She attended Menlo Atherton High School and graduated from Castilleja School in Palo Alto. She received her B.A. in chemistry from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her PhD in Biological Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles in the laboratory of William T. Wickner, working largely on the coat assembly of the M13 coliphage. Career and research Silver did her postdoctoral research with Mark Ptashne at Harvard University where she discovered one of the first nuclear localization sequences. She continued to study the mechanism of nuclear localization in her own lab as an assistant professor at Princeton University. During this time, she characterized the receptor for NLSs and discovered one of the first eukaryotic DnaJ chaperones. Silver continued in the area of Cell Biology upon moving to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute to hold the Claudia Adams Barr Investigatorship and to become Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber. During this time, she was among the first to follow GFP-tagged proteins in living cells. In addition, she initiated early studies in systems biology to examine interactions within the nucleus on a whole genome scale. Together with Bill Sellers, she discovered molecules that block nuclear export and formed the basis for a publicly traded company Karyopharm Therapeutics. She was promoted in 1997 to Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber. In 2004, Silver moved to the newly formed Department of Systems Biology at