Dr. de Paz-Silava is an Associate Professor of the UP College of Public Health (UP-CPH). She graduated magna cum laude in 2012 with a BS Biology degree from the Institute of Biology, College of Science, UP- Diliman. She pursued higher education in the UP College of Medicine where she obtained the double degree Doctor of Medicine - PhD in Molecular Medicine (MD-PhD) in 2019. She was awarded the Dr. Adolfo Bellosillo Academic Excellence Award for the Most Outstanding MD-PhD Graduate. For her PhD dissertation, she trained and worked as a visiting foreign research scholar under the supervision of Dr. Takashi Okamoto in Nagoya City University, Japan. She did research work on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) drug discovery, the beginning of her journey into becoming a virologist.

Dr. de Paz-Silava is currently the principal investigator of the Virology Laboratory of the Department of Medical Microbiology. She is also one of the founding members of the University of the Philippines – National Institutes of Health’s Philippine Study Group on Emerging Biological and Bioactive Agents (PhilSEA). Apart from being a researcher and academician, Dr. de Paz-Silava is also a physician who is involved in non-government organizations that offer primary care in rural and low-resource settings.

Her research interests include treatment, disease modeling, and biomarker discovery in emerging and re-emerging viral diseases.