Craig Silverstein is currently on leave from Stanford University, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science, with a focus on information retrieval and data mining. Silverstein contributed his expertise in compression algorithms to Google while it was still a research project at Stanford. His other academic pursuits include super-efficient versions of basic data structures such as hash tables as well as efficient clustering of large data sets using Scatter/Gather and latent semantic indexing as it relates to clustering, which he explored at Xerox PARC.

Silverstein graduated with honors with a bachelor's degree in computer science from Harvard College, from which he also received Phi Beta Kappa distinction, the Microsoft Technical Scholarship, and twice received the Derek Bok Award for Teaching Excellence. He was the first employee hired at Google by the company's founders.