As Vice Chancellor of Health Affairs for the University of California, Irvine, Dr. Goldstein oversees a $5.5 billion enterprise comprised of the Susan & Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences (with schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy and public health), six centers and institutes of health research, and the UCI Health delivery system. Empowered by 17,000 faculty and staff, 4,200 students and 760 clinical residents, he is leading a major expansion rooted in the vision that uniting health disciplines most effectively advances the frontiers of discovery, the education of the future healthcare workforce, and delivers optimal support for well-being that is personal and precise.
Goldstein is committed to maximizing continuous quality improvement through innovations that prevent and cure illnesses, improve patient care, train healthcare leaders, and advance policies that place the patient first, while controlling cost and caring for all people. Through the extraordinary generosity of Susan and Henry Samueli, the college has established a first-of-its-kind alliance of health disciplines and merged the benefits of conventional and complementary care. Working across disciplines, discovery leads to impact—smarter care, stronger systems, better patient outcomes, and healthier communities. This model is driven by the UC Irvine Health Affairs mission: Discover. Teach. Heal.
The unique approach Goldstein introduced has been a groundbreaking success, leading annual revenue to increase from $1.8 billion to $5.5 billion in seven years; a 72% increase in grant funding; and over $1 billion in gifts. During this period, he oversaw the creation of two new schools — the School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences (2022) and the Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health (2024) — and the construction of new buildings for research, teaching and clinical care, expanding the Health Affairs footprint by 3.8 million square feet.
First to open in 2022 was a two-building complex providing homes for the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing, the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute, and the two new schools. The Falling Leaves Foundation Medical Innovation Building opened in 2025; at 215,000 square feet, it is among the largest interdisciplinary translational research hubs on the West Coast. To complement the flagship 460-bed UCI Health — Orange medical center, a new $1.3 billion, 1.2 million-square-foot specialty medical campus, UCI Health — Irvine, was constructed on the main university grounds and includes the Joe C. Wen & Family Center for Advanced Care for outpatient services, the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and Ambulatory Care building, and a 144-bed acute-care hospital with 24-hour emergency services, the first hospital in the nation powered by an all-electric central utilities plant. To bring the benefits of academic healthcare to the entire region, UCI Health acquired four hospitals and associated ambulatory sites in 2024 to create a community healthcare network, expanding the system to 90 locations and 1,460 in-patient beds. As Orange County’s only academic health system, the UCI Health now offers ease of access to innovative, friendly, personalized, data-driven, world-class care for 5.6 million people in the region.
With more than 30 years of experience as a physician-scientist, pediatric cardiologist, ion channel biophysicist and administrator, Goldstein focuses on improving the human condition through research, education, and care. Previously, he served as professor and founding head of the Pediatric Developmental Biology and Biophysics Division at Yale University; chair of pediatrics, founding physician-in-chief of the Comer Children’s Hospital and founding director of two research institutes at the University of Chicago; dean and chief diversity officer of the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University Chicago; and provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Brandeis University.
Goldstein received his BA and MA in biochemistry from Brandeis University and holds an MD and a PhD in immunology from Harvard University. His research has defined new fields through discovery of ion channel superfamilies, identification of novel regulatory pathways, and elucidation of the mechanistic bases for sudden infant death syndrome in African Americans, inherited and drug-induced cardiac arrhythmias in adults, and acute lung injury. This has produced changes in practice, diagnostic tests, and, currently, development of novel therapies for life-threatening diseases of the heart, lungs and nervous system. An American Academy of Pediatrics Fellow, he received the prestigious E. Mead Johnson Award from the Society for Pediatric Research in 2001 and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2020 for his discoveries and contributions to academic medicine. He has served the National Institutes of Health as scientific advisor for the Nanomedicine Roadmap and as co-creator of the DataCOUNTS health data ecosystem and was vice chair of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Biological Sciences. Continually funded by the NIH throughout his career, a list of his published works is available here.
For more information about UC Irvine Health Affairs: https://healthaffairs.uci.edu.