Lynn Silver, MD, MPH, FAAP
Director, Getting it Right from the Start
Public Health Institute
Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician, researcher and public health advocate, is Senior Advisor at the Public Health Institute and Clinical Professor at University of California San Francisco. She focuses on policies to prevent noncommunicable disease, its risk factors and inequitable impact. Silver was Assistant Health Commissioner of New York City under Mayor Bloomberg, leading innovative policy work such as the nation’s first trans fat ban, calorie labeling law and the National Salt Reduction Initiative and supported innovative tobacco control policies and programs. She served as Health Officer for Sonoma County, California. She founded and co-chairs the California Alliance for Funding Prevention. At the Public Health Institute (PHI) she has worked on the Berkeley coalition that lead the nation’s first successful soda tax effort, and collaborated on soda tax campaigns in other cities and states. She recently completed evaluation of the Berkeley soda tax and is evaluating San Francisco’s first of its kind warning label for SSB advertising, as well as researching other regulatory policy issues in Latin America. Her interest in local marijuana regulation arose from her experience as a public health official and belief that more public health oriented measures are needed now to protect against youth and problem use in the setting of a rapidly expanding new legal industry for a product with significant harms. She received her MD and MPH degrees and pediatric training from the Johns Hopkins University and was previously visiting scholar at the Karolinska Institute
