Biography

Rashmi Gopal-Srivastava is a program director in the Initiatives & Consortium-Wide Activities Section of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program Branch within NCATS’ Division of Clinical Innovation, where she oversees and provides programmatic direction and management for several CTSA Program hubs. She also serves as the NCATS lead on the national CTSA Program Lifespan Domain Task Force that focuses on integrating translational science across the entire lifespan to attain improvements in health for all and promotes collaboration among more than 50 CTSA Program hubs. She represents NCATS on the Federal Working Group on Dietary Supplements, the Trans-NIH Coordinating Committee for Lymphatic Research and is a member of the Trans-NIH FDA Medical Devices Research Interest Group. Before joining the DCI, since 2006, Gopal-Srivastava was the director of the Extramural Research Program in the Office of Rare Diseases Research, now the Division of Rare Diseases Research Innovation, where she led and provided scientific & programmatic oversight and coordination to the Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network (RDCRN) — a multidisciplinary national program. RDCRN program is a collaborative effort with ten NIH Institutes. In addition, as NCATS representative she collaborated with the FDA on Medical Device Needs Assessment Project.

Gopal-Srivastava has worked at NIH since 1989 and has a diverse background in rare diseases, biochemistry, molecular biology, and basic and translational research. Her experience includes conducting and overseeing basic and translational research, managing extramural research programs, conducting scientific review of research grant applications, managing public-private partnerships, and leading and facilitating trans-NIH collaborations. She joined NIH as a laboratory researcher at the National Eye Institute and studied transcriptional regulation of alphaB Cyrstallin in various tissues, and in 1998 was appointed as a health scientist administrator at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). In 2003, she became a program director for a national translational research program, Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE), for breast cancer research in the Office of Director at NCI. She also managed a special program for the Avon Foundation–NCI partnership to support clinical research in breast cancer through the SPORE Program.

Gopal-Srivastava holds a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the Medical College of Virginia at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a past recipient of the Virginia Commonwealth fellowship and has received a research fellowship from the U.S. National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Gopal-Srivastava has received numerous NIH Individual Merit Awards. She also has received recognition from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for outstanding community services and NIH’s Asian Pacific Islander American Organization’s outstanding achievement award for excellence in science. She is an advocate for women in science and recently has been interviewed for the “Women of Color Scientists at NIH” and featured and showcased in “Women in Science at the National Institutes of Health 2007-2008.” Gopal-Srivastava has served as a keynote speaker at many national and international conferences.

Professional Interests

Gopal-Srivastava is focused on clinical and translational science research and in bringing more and better treatments faster to more patients, especially to rare disease patients.