She holds the position of Vice Provost for Academic Planning & Institutional Research and Distinguished Professor of Psychological Science, Public Health, and Medicine at the University of California, Irvine.
[12] As an undergraduate and graduate student, Silver worked with Philip Brickman,[13] whose suicide profoundly influenced her thinking about how people cope with traumatic events.
[21] Silver's studies examined how social constraints on discussions of a traumatic experience can interfere with cognitive processing of and recovery from loss, and have explored associations between intrusive thoughts and depressive symptoms.
In one of her well-publicized longitudinal studies,[22] Silver and her colleagues examined resilience among people who had had to cope with negative events such as natural disasters, divorce, a recent death, or illness.
[24] The researchers examined stress and depressive symptoms that people began experiencing at the beginning of March 2020 and how they coped with the deaths of family members and friends caused by COVID-19.
[27] The authors emphasized that reaching out to friends, family, and/or professionals to discuss emotions and thoughts were effective ways of coping and improving mental health during this time.