About Dr. Srivastava

Savita Srivastava, MD, is a board-certified gastroenterologist in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she leads Sentara Gastroenterology Specialists – Charlottesville, a practice of Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital. She trained in internal medicine at Georgetown and in gastroenterology at Yale, after earning her medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Her career has moved between academic and community medicine. She has served on the faculties of Duke University and the University of Virginia, and in 2018 she joined Augusta Health as Medical Director of its Gastroenterology Division. There, with colleague Christina Tennyson, MD, she wrote about a partnership between the hospital and the non-profit Allegheny Mountain Institute: an organic farm on the health system's campus that supplied produce to patients, staff, food banks and families facing food insecurity, along with cooking and nutrition workshops.

Why the microbiome

Dr. Srivastava has said that her interest in the early-life microbiome is personal as well as professional. Her daughter had eczema and food allergies as an infant, which led her to dig into the research on how a baby's gut microbes develop. As a gastroenterologist caring for adults with chronic digestive conditions, she also sees how much of gut health is shaped long before a patient arrives in clinic.

That work became First 1000 Days: How Your Baby's Gut Microbes Shape Lifelong Health (Empower Press, 2026), the first in a planned series on the microbiome across life stages. She speaks and writes about early-life gut health, fiber and plant diversity, probiotics and fermented foods, and colorectal cancer prevention.

How she practices

In clinic, her focus is guideline-based care for adults: screening and prevention, and careful evaluation of everyday problems like reflux, bloating, IBS and changes in bowel habits. She pairs this with practical attention to the things that shape the gut every day, such as food, sleep, stress, movement and the gut–brain connection, an approach she has described as integrative gastroenterology.