Jerson Lima Silva, professor of biochemistry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, director of the National Institute of Science and Technology for Structural Biology and Bioimaging, and scientific director of the State Funding Agency of Rio de Janeiro, grew up in a poor neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His father was a sergeant in the navy and his mother was a homemaker who made sweets and artificial flowers to supplement the family’s income. Silva had a stroke of luck early on in his education in the form of a primary school teacher who was very passionate about her job. “She inspired me with her love for reading and teaching,” he says. “The content of her lessons, no doubt, was very good, but the feeling of her love of the profession was something that greatly affected my soul.” He was interested in science from an early age, and thought that he would become a medical doctor.

Silva was accepted to the Chemistry Federal Technical School (ETFQ) for his high school years. “The first year of the course brought me some of the happiest memories of my life. In that year, 1976, I got in touch with the scientific method itself,” he says. “The teachers of ETFQ inflated my love for science. I now understood that the best way to get answers was to ask the right questions.” The school provided him with an excellent background in chemistry and physics, and positioned him well to study as an under­graduate in the medical school of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Before he began university, Silva had a research appointment at the Petrobras Research Center. “This experience greatly increased my range of options and created doubts about the medical career I thought I was sure to follow,” Silva says. He enjoyed conducting research, and decided that he would pursue a career in biomedical science research.

Silva joined the department of medical biochemistry, led by Leopoldo de Meis, as an undergraduate research student. Silva’s advisor, Sergio Verjovski- Almeida, gave him a great deal of responsibility early on, which encouraged him further. “I found in the department a highly motivating environment for biomedical research, since its cornerstone was to encourage young people recently arrived at the university toward a scientific career,” Silva says. “The way Professor Verjovski-Almeida advised me as an undergraduate student also deeply marked my career. He gave me a project to conduct by myself when I was only 19 years old. Sergio and Leopoldo instilled in me the love for experimentation, bounded by the theoretical framework.”

When Silva finished his undergraduate studies, he decided to apply to the PhD program in UFRJ’s Carlos Chagas Filho Institute of Biophysics. “It was like a PhD/MD program, although was not formally conceived at that time,” he explains. Silva worked on the Ca2+-ATPase of the sarcoplasmic reticulum, responsible for calcium pumping and crucial to the function of the muscle fiber. “In these studies, I used different fluorescence spectroscopy methods, and this was one of the reasons I looked for a postdoc position in the laboratory of Professor Gregorio Weber at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,” says Silva. “I met [Weber] when he visited Rio de Janeiro in 1983, and he encouraged me to go to Urbana. Just after I gradu­ated from the medical school in January 1985, I did go to Urbana to work with him.”

In Weber’s lab, Silva studied the plasticity of proteins and supramolecular structures and their physiological consequences. The lab atmosphere was welcoming, and he became friends with his lab mates, including Catherine Royer, Suzanne Scarlata, and Gerard Marriott. Silva was very inspired by Weber; he says, “He practiced sci­ence for science, always assuming he could make mistakes, but never giving up on an idea because one thing went wrong.”

Royer recalls meeting Silva for the first time just after he arrived from Brazil to Urbana in January. “Jerson and his wife came straight to the lab from the airport. They arrived and shortly after that a major blizzard hit. I could not drive home with them because of weather conditions, so we had to walk through a driving blizzard,” she remembers. “They had arrived less than an hour before from Rio de Janeiro! I was truly amazed that they stuck it out all winter—and even longer—in Urbana.”

Silva completed his PhD in 1987 and then accepted a position as assistant professor of biochemistry at UFRJ, where he is currently a full professor. “My career-long interest revolves around the understanding of biological recogni­tion processes, especially how proteins correctly fold and interact with nucleic acids and how proteins undergo misfolding, related to neurode­generative diseases and cancer,” he explains. “In contributions spanning more than 25 years, our work has opened new vistas for the use of pres­sure in the fields of protein folding and dynamics and their biotechnological applications in virus inactivation and vaccines.”

Silva is also director of the Jiri Jonas Na­tional Center of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (CNRMN-UFRJ), the first NMR facility in Brazil, which he founded in 1998. The center seemed like a pipe dream when he had first con­ceived of it, but he was able to see it through after a challenging effort. “When I was a Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Illinois in 1991, I suggested to Professor Jiri Jonas that we use high-pressure NMR to study dissociation and dena­turation of ARC repressor, and the outcome of this story could not be better. We could confirm our previous fluorescence study that high pressure dissociates ARC repressor into molten-globule monomers and have structural information,” Silva says. “The possibility of combining structural data obtained by NMR and thermodynamics through high pressure appeared to me as a ‘Columbus’ egg.’ It was a dream that deserved to be pursued.”

Silva’s dream became reality with support from his local colleagues and experts abroad—and after much effort. Since its opening in 1998, CNRMN-UFRJ has made a great impact on structural biology research in Latin America. “In the last 17 years, more than 300 investigators from Brazil and around the world have used the facility,” he shares. “It has also fundamentally con­tributed to a new generation of young scientists studying structural biology in Latin America.” More recently, the facility has expanded to include a microscopy facility and a small animal bioimag­ing facility and has become the National Institute of Science and Technology for Structural Biol­ogy and Bioimaging (INBEB). The institute is “a pioneering initiative with a mission to create and consolidate a scientific-technical infrastructure that allows for the study of structures or biologi­cal systems, from the macromolecular level to the whole organism, making use of the most advanced analytical techniques and the highest possible resolution images,” Silva explains.

Though Silva’s multiple roles, as professor, direc­tor of INBEB, and scientific director of the State Funding Agency of Rio de Janeiro, provide him with many challenges, he is rewarded by his work in a variety of ways, chief of which is following the successful careers on his former students. “When a former student becomes a scientist with her/his own laboratory, you can follow the transfer of training and experience in a cascade,” he says. “This scientific family tree is crucial to science, both locally and globally.”

When he is not working, Silva likes to spend his time with his wife, Debora Foguel, and children, Juliana, Estevão, Vitor, and Ana Luisa. He also en­joys cinema, reading novels and poetry, and writ­ing poetry. His first book, a collection of poems entitled Quase Poesia (Quasi-Poetry) is in press.