Hail to the Chiefs: Robert Mahley

Robert Mahley was 37 when he moved across country to serve as the founding president of Gladstone Institutes. At the time, he had been running a small lab at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). When he came to Gladstone, there was no building, no administration, no policies, and no procedures. There was only the trustees’ vision, and that’s what captured Mahley’s attention, sparked his imagination, and brought him and his entire lab in 1979 from their well-established, protective NIH comfort zone, to the West Coast, where they faced an unknown but hopeful future.