Srinivasan’s parents immigrated from Chennai.
Balaji Srinivasan, an Indian American biotech entrepreneur, is being considered by the Trump transition team to the post of commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Srinivasan, who is the co-founder and the CEO of a bitcoin startup 21.co, met President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday. According to a statement by the incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, the Trump Transition team is considering Srinivasan and Jim O’Neil to top positions in the FDA.
O’Neil is a former official at the Department of Health and Human Services under the presidency of George W Bush.
If the transition team confirms Srinivasan’s appointment to the FDA, he will become the third Indian American to be appointed by Trump transition team to serve in the next administration after South Carolina Gov. Nikki Hailey, who will be U.S. Ambassador to the UN, and Seema Verma, who will be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The appointment of all three Indian Americans will be valid only after their confirmation by the U.S. Senate.
Srinivasan is a graduate from the Department of Developmental Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was introduced to Donald Trump by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who is an investor in Srinivasan’s bitcoin company 21.co.
Srinivasan also teaches the Stanford’s Bitcoin Engineering course at bitcoin.stanford.edu and the Startup Engineering MOOC at coursera.org/course/startup. In the past, he has taught data mining (Stats 202), statistics (Stats 110), and computational biology (Stats 366) in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University.
Srinivasan co-founded Counsyl in 2008 and remained as it CTO till 2012. He was responsible for the scientific codebase, marketing, design, public relations, recruiting, training, fundraising, and technical vision as we grew from an idea on a napkin to one of the largest clinical genome centers in the world.
It was in 2013 that Srinivasan cofounded the bitcoin company 21.co, which has been funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Qualcomm, Cisco, and Khosla Ventures. The company deals with development of full stack software and hardware for bitcoin micropayments.
One of Trumps’ proposed plans for the pharma sector is to cut the price of drugs and allow more competition in the field. Srinivasan and Thiel have been critical of the FDA’s role in regulation.