Viviana Gradinaru (Stanford PhD, Caltech BS) is the Troendle Professor of Neuroscience and Biological Engineering at Caltech and Director and Davis Leadership Chair of the Merkin Institute for Translational Research. In 2024 Gradinaru was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and as one of the Great Immigrants Awardees from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Prof. Gradinaru is interested in brain and body circuits and how they malfunction in neurodegeneration and psychiatric disorders. Her driving motivation is the realization that to understand the highly-distributed neural circuits underlying physiology and behavior we need tools for observing and manipulating these circuits that are minimally invasive yet wide-reaching, while also highly specific in time, space and action. In response to this challenge and combining neuroscience, protein engineering, and data science, her laboratory has developed diverse neurotechnologies including optogenetic actuators, tissue clearing and imaging methods, and engineered adeno-associated viral vectors (AAVs) for targeted gene delivery to the peripheral and/or central nervous systems through simple intravenous injections rather than invasive surgery. These methods have been licensed by diagnostic and therapeutic companies and are broadly used by thousands of laboratories worldwide to study, among other things, the circuits underlying digestion, cardiac physiology, pain, neurodevelopment, neurodegeneration and behavior.

Work in her own lab now uses these neurotechnologies to understand defense mechanisms and transport across the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and move towards targeted, noninvasive study and repair of the brain. Professor Gradinaru is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (2022) and AAAS (2021) "for extraordinary achievements in bioengineering and neuroscience, including development and sharing of multiple novel tools to enable functional and anatomical access to the vertebrate nervous system," and has received the NIH Director's Innovator and Pioneer awards, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and Outstanding Young Investigator awards from both the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy and the Society for Neuroscience. She was also awarded the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science and was an Early-Career Scientist Winner in the Innovators in Science Award in Neuroscience by Takeda and the New York Academy of Sciences.

Prof. Gradinaru is also a co-founder of Capsida Biotherapeutics, a fully-integrated AAV engineering and gene therapy company with 2 FDA IND approvals for epilepsy and Parkinson's, showing how basic research could lead towards targeted, noninvasive, therapeutics delivery across the blood-brain barrier for neurological and neuropsychiatric healthcare.