Dr. Jeffrey Silva received his undergraduate bachelor’s degree at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, with a major in chemistry and minor in biochemistry. He pursued his PhD at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied aflatoxin biosynthesis in Aspergillus, utilizing molecular biology techniques to isolate the gene cluster for the biosynthetic machinery of the polyketide natural product and express a key enzyme (versicolorin B synthase) for active site mechanistic studies. He attended a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School where he studied bacterial two-component signal transduction of vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (vanRS) in an E.coli model system.

His interest in natural product biosynthesis and signal transduction led him to join a start-up Biotech company called Microbia in 1998, which engineered microbial organisms by altering endogenous signal transduction to program overproduction of pharmaceutically relevant natural products (ie. penicillin & lovastatin). In 2001, he joined Waters Corporation to immerse himself in mass spectrometry and Proteomics and helped develop a novel application called DIA (data independent acquisition) for global protein analysis using liquid chromatography and high-resolution mass spectrometry (DIA-LC-MS).

In 2005, he joined Cell Signaling Technology to lead a Proteomics service group that utilized unique immuno-affinity capture reagents with LC-MS at tools to probe cellular signaling and protein post-translational modifications for drug discovery and disease biology. In 2015, he joined a start-up company called Adeptrix Corporation, and served as their Chief Technology Officer to develop a microarray technology platform that utilized single-bead immunoaffinity capture with MALDI mass spectrometry as an efficient method for targeted proteomics, with products and applications in virology, neurology, oncology and food-OMICs. Dr. Silva recently returned to Cell Signaling Technology in 2023 as a Principal Scientist in the Proteomics group, where he continues to champion the integration of immunoaffinity reagents with the mass spectrometry as powerful tools for translational research.