Iowa Medicine Alum Supports His Two Passions: Theater and Neuroscience

PHOTO: JOSH O'LEARY Carver College of Medicine alumnus Dee Silver is pictured at the UI Theatre Building earlier this year.

This past spring, Dee Silver (67MD, 70R) returned to Iowa City, where almost six decades earlier he embarked on a long and successful career in neurology. Although his University of Iowa years were spent on the medical campus, what Silver looked forward to most on this visit was an event at the UI Theatre Building. 

There, Silver sat in on a reading of a new project by playwright and composer Christopher Lysik (24MFA), the recipient of this year’s Dee Silver, MD, Iowa Playwright Fellowship. Silver established the award in 2023 to support a new work annually by a UI postgraduate, and Lysik—a recent alumnus of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop—was fine-tuning his new musical play, Songs for the Anthropocene. 

“Theater is a window in which you can look at life, history, culture, and the human condition,” says Silver. “You can see yourself in it and learn.” 

Lysik, the second recipient of the annual Silver fellowship, spent the year writing songs and a narrative centered around the theme of “climate grief”—coming to terms with the environmental losses associated with climate change. “To get one more year where I can really just focus on this has been profound,” says Lysik, a Rhode Island native who studied acting at Rutgers University before earning an MFA at Iowa. 

After workshopping Songs for the Anthropocene at the UI, Lysik will lead a reading of the work in the coming year at San Diego’s Cygnet Theatre, which is made possible through Silver’s fellowship. Lysik plans to continue to develop the project with the goal of bringing it to full production. 

Lysik says he’s grateful to Silver for the partnership with a professional theater. “Having the support necessary to work on and grow the play, and then be able to introduce audiences and other theater professionals to it, is a really unique opportunity,” says Lysik.

“Theater is a window in which you can look at life, history, culture, and the human condition. You can see yourself in it and learn.” —Dee Silver

A Belle Plaine, Iowa, native, Silver discovered his love for theater as an undergraduate studying music education at the University of Northern Iowa, where he played in the orchestra for several musicals. Silver ultimately chose a career in medicine, and he worked for almost 50 years as a neurologist in private practice at Scripps Health in San Diego specializing in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Silver became deeply involved in the San Diego theater community as a patron and donor, including at the Cygnet Theatre. In recent years, he’s taken acting classes and performed in several of his church’s stage productions. 

In addition to the playwriting fellowship, Silver also has funded a junior faculty research award in the UI-based Iowa Neuroscience Institute. The most recent recipient is assistant professor Serena Banu Gumusoglu (20PhD), director of the Molecular Investigation of Neuroscience, Development, and Obstetrics Lab at the UI Carver College of Medicine. 

Gumusoglu’s lab investigates how complications of pregnancy such as infection, stress, and hypertensive disease influence child and maternal brain health. The work funded by Silver’s award builds on the lab’s previous findings that pregnancy may protect against some aspects of cognitive decline and brain aging. Her aim is to uncover how pregnancy shields the brain and explore potential dementia treatments. 

“High-impact, high-reward research is often hard to fund via traditional grant mechanisms,” says Gumusoglu. “We are so grateful for this philanthropic support that will open doors and expand our research program in really promising new ways.” 

Theater and neuroscience each offer insights into what makes us human, says Silver. And Iowa is among the rare places where his two passions converge by drawing top minds like Lysik and Gumusoglu. 

“They’re great people, and that’s the foundation,” says Silver. “It’s great to see Iowa growing.”