Pamela Silver is the Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University where she runs the Sustainability Futures Initiative. Silver grew up California, received her BS at UC Santa Cruz and her PhD at the UCLA and followed with Postdoctoral work at Harvard University where she was an American Cancer Society Fellow. She was an Assistant Professor at Princeton prior to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School where she was a Professor in the Dept of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. She was one of the first members of the new Dept of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School where her laboratory now resides. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and the past Daniel’s Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has received the Distinguished Alumni Award from UCSC, the Innovative Technology Prize (BIO), the FastCompany Innovation Award and the Joseph Henry Lecture of the Philosophical Society. She has been recognized as one of the top Global Synthetic Biology Influencers and her work named as one of the top 10 Breakthroughs by the World Economic Forum. She is the founder of several companies and served as a member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB).