Dr. Silveyra is the Director of the Biobehavioral Laboratory in the UNC School of Nursing. Her research focuses on sex differences in inflammatory lung disease. She studies the role of sex hormones and steroid hormone receptor signaling in mechanisms of lung inflammation. Her expertise includes animal models of asthma and air pollution exposure, rodent endocrine models of gonadectomy/hormone replacement/estrous cycle regulation, and transgenic models of sex steroid hormone receptors. She also has expertise in biomarker research, employing transcriptomics and miRNA profiling to clinical studies of bronchopulmonary dysplasia and pulmonary hypertension of the newborn. Her work has been funded by multiple foundation grants and the National Institutes of Health. She currently holds K01 and R03 awards from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
Dr. Silveyra received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State College of Medicine, focusing on mechanisms of pulmonary surfactant protein expression with Dr. Joanna Floros, after being selected as an Ambassadorial Scholar of The Rotary Foundation. She joined the Penn State faculty in 2011 as Research Associate, and as Assistant Professor and NIH K12 BIRCWH scholar in 2013. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2018, prior to joining UNC in September 2018.
Dr. Silveyra is a mentor and advocate for women and underrepresented minority trainees, and she serves in various national organizations and committees, including the American Physiological Society, the American Thoracic Society, the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences, and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS).
