Dr. Deepak Srivastava is president of Gladstone Institutes. He is also the Younger Family Professor and a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, and director of the Roddenberry Stem Cell Center. At UC San Francisco, Srivastava is a professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Biochemistry and Biophysics, and is the Wilma and Adeline Pirag Distinguished Professor in pediatric developmental cardiology.

The Srivastava lab is focused on the gene networks that guide the development of the heart, seeking to understand how aberrations in these pathways can cause congenital heart disease, and how they can use this knowledge to generate new cardiac cells to repair heart damage. One powerful approach they use is creating models of heart disease in a dish by reprogramming human cells from patients carrying mutations in cardiac developmental genes, editing them with CRISPR technology and analyzing changes at the single cell level. This has led them to discover perturbations in pivotal genetic pathways that contribute to disease, and identified the nodes that can be therapeutically targeted to restore heart cells to normal function.