Deepak Srivastava, MD

“I’ve always been a believer that the truly disruptive discoveries will come usually from outside one’s own field and applying those approaches to your own field.”

Deepak Srivastava is the President of Gladstone Institutes and a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is also a Senior Investigator of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease and Director of the Roddenberry Stem Cell Center.

In his research on heart disease, Srivastava studies cardiac developmental pathways and how the gene networks can generate new cardiac cells to repair heart damage and restore function. He models human cardiovascular diseases by editing cells containing mutations with CRISPR technology and analyzing changes that occur at the cell level. His lab has reprogrammed non-muscle cells in the mouse heart to function like muscle cells, effectively regenerating heart muscle after damage.

He was formerly the President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research and a Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He also co-founded biotechnology companies iPierian Inc. and Tenaya Therapeutics.

Srivastava is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Medicine.

He received his B.S. from Rice University, M.D. from the University of Texas, and trained in pediatrics at UCSF and in pediatric cardiology at Harvard Medical School.