Deepak Srivastava, director, Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, San Francisco

An overnight sailing trip helped Deepak Srivastava to plot a course for his scientific career. Brad Thompson, his mentor at medical school, took the newly minted MD out on his boat to celebrate Srivastava's graduation.

The dark calm of the night sea provided Srivastava with an opportunity to chart his future. “It was one of those discussions you have with no lights or no electricity,” Srivastava says. “I asked Brad if he were a young hotshot, which direction would he take.” (see CV).

Thompson replied that looking at pluripotent cells — cells that can differentiate into many other types — would be a major growth area. His prophecy would ring true years later when human embryonic stem cells were cultivated.

Srivastava experienced another moment of clarity during a stint as a paediatric resident at the University of California, San Francisco. “I really enjoyed taking care of infants with heart disease,” Srivastava says. “The cells didn't get told to do the right things, so it took me back to my initial research interest.”

Those two moments of insight combined to lead Srivastava into a research training programme for paediatric scientists. This allowed him to focus on the lab, with no need for teaching, grant-writing or making clinical rounds.

Since then, Srivastava has primarily worked on how precursor cells become heart cells — first based in Boston, then at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. At the latter, he met Eric Olson, another key mentor with whom he has continued to collaborate after they both moved to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

At the helm of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of California, San Francisco, Srivastava will be able to take a genetic and developmental-biology approach to heart disease, including examining the role of gene regulation and cell differentiation in heart disease. San Francisco is an especially good place to tackle these problems, he says — especially as California recently voted to fund stem-cell research.