Samuel Silverstein might be the only individual at Columbia University who has contributed to cellular biology, scaled mountains in Antarctica, and argued for income transparency in University Senate, a body known for low attendance and stifling bureaucracy.
Silverstein, who has been at Columbia since 1984, plays a vast number of roles at the University, from his position as the John C. Dalton Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, to active University Senator, to founder of the Columbia University Summer Research Program for Science Teachers.
Since attending high school in Colorado Springs, Colorado because he suffered from asthma in New York City, Silverstein has been a fan of the outdoors. In 1967, he received the John Oliver LaGorce medal from the National Geographic Society for his exploration of previously unexplored mountains in Antarctica.
After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1958, where he pursued a major in government and a minor in geology, Silverstein attended the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he received an M.D. in 1963. Next, he became a faculty member at Rockefeller University in the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology.
At Rockefeller, Silverstein was instrumental in the formulation of the “zipper mechanism” concept, which describes immune phagocytosis, the process in which immune cells eat viruses. Silverstein is also well known for his work on Legionnaires’ Disease, an ailment largely caused by an aquatic organism.
Silverstein sees one of his main accomplishments, though, to be outside of the lab, namely the creation of the CU Summer Research Program for Science Teachers.
This program—based on the concept that teachers who understand the material they’re teaching are more likely to help their students understand it—provides hands-on experience in labs to high school science teachers from the New York City area who might not otherwise have access to these resources. Evaluations based on the state Regents Exams have shown that students from participating schools scored 10 percent better than the students of teachers who hadn’t attended.
“Hands-on experience is very important,” Silverstein said.
Silverstein said he believes that programs such as these are extremely important because the state of science education in the United States compared to that in other countries is bound to impact the nation’s standing in other sectors, a situation he describes as being “the race between education and technology.”
“If we don’t do something,” Silverstein said, “we won’t remain a first class economy in the 21st century.”
Speaking about his other work, Silverstein said he particularly enjoys his position as a faculty member of the University Senate, where he has recently been involved in putting forward a “Resolution to Complete a Comprehensive University-Wide Policy on the Reporting of Individual Income from Non-University Sources,” along with Robert Pollack, a measure that Silverstein said he believes would increase transparency.
He said he particularly enjoys serving on the University Senate because it “puts [me] back in contact with a lot of people from other disciplines,” and it is “a nice way to be involved in the policy issues that affect organizations, especially universities.”
He called the senate “a way to sort out places where we have differences and to decide what is acceptable.”
Alexa Davis can be reached at alexa.davis@columbiaspectator.com.