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Sun Min
Director of Media Relations
Alyssa Vine
Associate Director of Media Relations
Rae Silver
Helene L. and Mark N. Kaplan Professor of Natural & Physical Sciences
Rae Silver is the Helene L. and Mark N. Kaplan Professor of Natural & Physical Sciences and the head of the Silver Neurobiology Laboratory. Since 1976, Professor Silver has been a member of Barnard’s faculty and has taught courses in Quantitative Reasoning, Neuroscience and Psychology. The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Mental Health, and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Office of Naval Research, are among the organizations that have supported her research.
Over the course of her career, Professor Silver has held many positions on committees in services to the educational community, the scientific and research community, and the Barnard and Columbia communities. Currently, she is a US Representative and serves as Vice-chair on the Council of Scientists for the Human Frontiers Science Program and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine Forum on Neuroscience. Her work as Senior Advisor at the National Science Foundation helped to create a series of workshops to examine opportunities for the next decade in making advances in Neuroscience through the joint efforts of biologists, chemists, educators, mathematicians, physicists, psychologists and statisticians. She served as co-chair of the NASA committee that prioritized biological research for the International Space Station. She is a fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Her two research areas focus on sleep-wake cycles and their neural bases, and on immune – nervous system interactions in the brain.
Selected Publications
Joseph LeSauter, Nawshin Hoque, Michael Weintraub, Donald W. Pfaff, and Rae Silver (2009) Stomach ghrelin-secreting cells as food-entrainable circadian clocks. PNAS August 11, 2009 vol. 106 no. 32 13582-13587
Nautiyal KM, Ribeiro AC, Pfaff DW, Silver R. "Brain mast cells link the immune system to anxiety-like behavior." Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Nov 18;105(46):18053-7.
Matthew P. Butler and Rae Silver (2009) "Basis of robustness and resilience in SCN circuits: Individual neurons form circuits that repeat a daily sequence of activity to produce a cell based brain clock." J Biol Rhythms 2009; 24; 340-352
Lily Yan, Ilia Karatsoreos, Joseph LeSauter, David K. Welsh Steve Kay, Duncan Foley, Rae Silver (2008) "Exploring Spatio-temporal Organization of SCN Circuits." Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 2007;72:527-41. PMID: 18419312
Karatsoreos I, and Silver R (2007) "The neuroendocrinology of the uprachiasmatic nucleus as a conductor of body time in mammals" Endocrinology 148: 5487-5495.
Yan L, Bobula JM, Svenningsson P, Greengard P, Silver R. (2006) DARPP-32 involvement in the photic pathway of the circadian system." J Neurosci. 26:9434-9438.
Ribeiro, AC, Sawa E, Carren-LeSauter I, LeSauter J, Silver R and Pfaff, DW (2008). "Two forces for arousal: Pitting hunger versus circadian influences and identifying neurons responsible for changes in behavioral arousal." Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Dec 11;104(50):20078-83.
Elise Drouyer, Joseph LeSauter, Amanda L. Hernandez, Rae Silver "Specializations of Gastrin Releasing Peptide Cells of the Mouse Suprachiasmatic Nucleus." (submitted, J Comparative Neurology, 2009)
Joseph LeSauter, Taslima Bhuiyan, Takao Shimazoe and Rae Silver (2009) "Circadian Trafficking of Calbindin-ir in Fibers of SCN Neurons." J. Biological Rhythms (in press).
Rae Silver and Joseph LeSauter (2008) "Circadian and Homeostatic Factors in Arousal." NY Acad. Sci. 1129: 263-274.
Yan, L., Silver, R. (2009) "Day-length encoding through tonic photic effects in the retinorecipient SCN region" European Journal of Neuroscience 28 (10), pp. 2108-2115.
212.854.5531
rsilver@barnard.edu
EDUCATION:
B.Sc. Honours, McGill University
M.A., City College of the City University of New York
Ph.D., Institute of Animal Behavior, Rutgers
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SPECIALIZATIONS:
Sleep-wake cycles
Immune-nervous system interactions in the brain