Draft:Deepak Srivastava

Deepak Srivastava (born May 14, 1966) is the president of Gladstone Institutes, where he is also a senior investigator and the Robert W. and Linda Mahley Distinguished Professor. Additionally, he is director of the Roddenberry Stem Cell Center at Gladstone. At UC San Francisco, with which Gladstone is affiliated, Srivastava is a professor in the Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics. He is also the Wilma and Adeline Pirag Distinguished Professor in Pediatric Developmental Cardiology, and an attending physician in pediatric cardiology at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals.

Srivastava's laboratory focuses on understanding the causes of heart disease and on using knowledge of cardiac developmental pathways to devise novel therapeutic approaches for human cardiac disorders. The family settled in Los Angeles, where Srivastava’s father had joined the faculty at City of Hope Medical Center. Eight years later, they moved to Texas so his father could accept a professorship at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

Early Life

Born in India, Srivastava immigrated to the United States with his father, a biochemist, his mother, a teacher, and his two older sisters when he was under one year of age. The family settled in Los Angeles, where Srivastava’s father had joined the faculty at City of Hope Medical Center. Eight years later, they moved to Texas so his father could accept a professorship at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

Education and early career

Srivastava completed his schooling in Texas, eventually earning a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at Rice University. Citing an early interest in medicine and wanting to help people, Srivastava went on to earn his medical degree at The University of Texas Medical Branch. It was during medical school that he became interested in genome regulation and its link to disease. He performed his residency in pediatrics at UC San Francisco and, mentored by notable professors such as Larry Shapiro, Abraham Rudolph, and Julien Hoffman, solidified an interest in pediatric cardiology.

Srivastava completed a fellowship in pediatric cardiology at Boston Children’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School and then, inspired by the work of molecular biologist Eric Olson, completed another fellowship in Olson’s lab at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Together, they mapped the key transcription factors directing heart development.

In 1996, Deepak was appointed associate professor, rising to professor, in the Departments of Pediatrics and Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He led his own lab there until being recruited to San Francisco in 2005 to direct the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease. He was named president of Gladstone Institutes in 2018, becoming the third president in the organization’s history.

Leadership

After taking the helm at Gladstone, Srivastava began expanding the organization’s scientific capabilities. He established the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology in 2018 and the Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology in 2020. He recruited two scientists who went on to become Nobel laureates: stem cell expert Shinya Yamanaka and Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of the CRISPR gene editing technology. He also added a number of early career scientists from varied disciplines to Gladstone’s laboratory teams.

In 2022, Srivastava announced plans to further extend Gladstone’s footprint by adding more than a dozen new labs and recruiting hundreds of new scientists, and to deepen the organization’s expertise in the areas of AI and clinical translation.