Keya Gupta, MHA ’22, serves as Chief of Staff at the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Clara and is recognized by industry observers as an up-and-coming leader in healthcare. Named a “40 Under 40 Honoree” by the Greater Irvine Chamber in 2024 and given multiple awards by the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE), Gupta also enthusiastically mentors current students in Concordia’s Master of Health Administration (MHA) program.
“I truly am so blessed to have spent my graduate tenure at Concordia,” Gupta says. “What I gained was so much more than I ever could have imagined — a forever community, a professional network, lifelong friends and mentors.”
Dr. Catherine Sinardi, director of Concordia’s MHA program, calls Gupta “one of the most inspirational, empathetic and enthusiastic people. She is gracious, professional — a shining star.”
But Gupta’s path to a career — and to a graduate degree — was clouded when her father, a high-level NASA chief, suddenly fell ill with a life-threatening disease that threw the family and Keya’s own plans into confusion.
Gupta had grown up in a distinguished family of high performers. Her father, Dr. Kajal K. Gupta, had earned two doctorates including a PhD from University of Cambridge and a DSc from the Royal Society of London, and worked his way up to chief aeronautical engineer and subject matter expert for NASA. Gupta calls him “an incredible individual and extraordinarily intelligent. He worked on some of the biggest projects NASA has done in his forty-year career there.”
Her parents hoped their daughters would become doctors. An indicative family photo shows Keya at age four checking her dad’s heart with a play stethoscope.
“Becoming a doctor was my dad’s unfulfilled dream,” she says. “A little part of him wanted to live vicariously through me.”
But while in the pre-med program at U.C. Irvine, Keya was drawn to networking events for business majors which opened her eyes to other career possibilities. She then interned at the Downs Syndrome Association of Orange County and “became enamored of the idea of helping communities who really need support due to their health needs.” This drew her interest to healthcare administration instead of practicing medicine.
At around that time, the issue of health needs became very personal when her father was diagnosed with end-stage renal disease. “It was obviously a shock,” she says. “For a while I was like, how can this be true? You look at your loved one, and he looked fine.” With her mother reeling from the diagnosis and her sister newly enrolled at a university in New York, Keya took responsibility to manage his care and help her mother navigate the healthcare system.
“Part of me wanted to be at those dialysis appointments and doctors’ appointments to make sure Dad was receiving the best care, to be his advocate,” Keya says. That meant class in the mornings and scrambling home to Santa Clarita to get her father ready for afternoon appointments, only to return to campus later for tests and homework.
“Those car rides were times of high stress, to get there on time and make sure Dad was ready to go,” she says.
“I was in fight or flight mode. I didn’t even have time to think about it. I was under high stress for three to four years trying to juggle everything,” she says. In the blur of those days she graduated with her bachelor’s degree and began working for the Downs Syndrome Association. There she observed that many local leaders in health-adjacent industries had MHA degrees. She decided to look into programs, and her mother suggested Concordia, having stumbled upon the campus one time while visiting Irvine.
“She was enamored with how hidden and gorgeous it was,” Keya says. “She said, ‘Why don’t you check out Concordia?’ Lo and behold there was an MHA program which was exactly what I was looking for. It felt right. I had this gut feeling.” But applying to graduate school while caring for an increasingly ill father was taxing.
“My mind was ‘Go, go, go, do, do, do,” she says. “I think I became numb for a long time to facing the emotional side of it. I kept a lot of it internal because I didn’t want my mom to see. I wanted her to feel okay.”
Sinardi remembers how Gupta’s application essay, about being her dad’s caregiver, “shook me to the core.”
“The essay was amazing,” Sinardi says. “We had to make sure she got into our program.” Dr. Tricia Kassab, adjunct professor at Concordia’s MHA program, also took early note of Gupta.
Kassab had spent her forty-year career on the front lines of healthcare, first working in open heart and trauma ICUs, then as a helicopter life-flight nurse before becoming a longtime healthcare executive serving as vice president of various departments for large hospital systems in Southern California including St. Joseph’s, City of Hope, and Adventist Hope.
Kassab met Gupta when serving as chapter president of ACHE SoCal. Gupta, then a Concordia student, volunteered to help with a special project.
“She was a rock star from day one,” Kassab says. “The end product was amazing. I was so impressed with Keya. She is very creative, has vision and asks really insightful questions about leadership. She’s detailed and her execution and follow through are impeccable. She’ll take on projects and figure them out. That shows initiative.”
While a student at Concordia, Keya brought her father to campus in a wheelchair to see where she had enrolled.
“He teared up a little bit, and I could see he was trying not to get emotional,” she says. “He said, ‘Wow, this really reminds me of Claremont. I think you chose the right place.’”
He had served as an adjunct professor at Caltech and Claremont’s Harvey Mudd College for some time. Now his eldest daughter was carrying the family legacy forward in her own professional path.
And so she continued to drive between Irvine and Santa Clarita for classes and caregiving, playing the piano and performing classical Indian dance to relax, and focusing on professional development to anchor herself to a vision of the future.
“I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed being in Concordia’s MHA program,” she says. “I had a lot of support from Dr. Sinardi, Tricia Kassab and other professors who knew what my situation was. They gave me a lot of flexibility to be Dad’s caregiver and continue to be successful in the program. I couldn’t have done it without them.”
One of her favorite classes was Vocation and Ethics for Healthcare Administrators. “Ethics is a big deal in healthcare and that class was eye opening to me,” she says. “We had to go back to Lutheran texts, pull out teachings and apply them to case studies. It was extremely beneficial.”
Through it all, “Dad was my rock, motivating me to continue with the program and pursue my passions,” she says.
He submitted to thrice-weekly dialysis appointments with aplomb and made the best of them by treating the doctors and nurses to boba and other treats. But one day Keya’s mother called with the news that her father had been rushed to Henry Mayo Hospital. As Keya searched for solutions, doctors concluded that further medical interventions would only do more harm.
She searched through hundreds of white papers to find an innovative care solution for her dad and worked with her dad’s care team to build a care plan. She asked her dad what he wanted to do. Keya remembers her father saying, “I’m ready to go home.”
“That’s when I knew we needed to honor his wishes” by not advocating for further procedures, she says. Three days later, his condition worsened, and he stopped responding. “I sat in his room bawling my eyes out,” Keya says. “Those three or four years all culminated, being back and forth with him, the pressures.”
He died peacefully in his sleep, and the mother and two sisters drove to Big Sur, one of his favorite places, to scatter his ashes in a waterfall. While grieving, Gupta graduated with accolades from Concordia.
Kassab helped her secure a job in the industry. She also introduced her to a new hobby: quilting.
“We were talking one day, and she noticed my embroidery,” says Kassab. “She said, ‘Oh, my gosh, how do you do that?’ and got really excited, so I told her, ‘You’re going to make a quilt.’”
Since then, the pair quilts together, finding attractive patterns and shopping at fabric stores. They have grown so close that on the past two Mother’s Days, Keya, Keya’s mom and Kassab have gone out for brunch together. When Keya received the 40 Under 40 award from Irvine Chamber of Commerce, she invited her mom and Kassab to attend the ceremony.
“That was very special,” Kassab says. Gupta was hired by UCI Health in 2024 as a consultant to the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Nursing Officer working on special projects. After six months, she was promoted and was asked to support and lead the operations activation of the country’s first all-electric acute care hospital in Irvine.
“I knew I could do it,” Gupta says. “I’ve gone through so much that if someone gives me something, I can tackle it successfully even if I don’t have that subject matter expertise. The experience of being ‘Go, go, go, do, do, do,” has given me the skills to be an operator.” Concordia’s MHA program named Keya the 2023 Alumni Award recipient.
The hospital opened last December. Gupta had already been recruited and was transitioning to Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara to serve as the Chief of Staff.
“When deciding to take the leap, I thought of the fact that my dad had moved around for growth opportunities —— and the new job is pretty close to Big Sur,” she says. “I felt it was something I had to do to honor him. Everything I do from a career perspective is really in his name. That’s what continues to motivate me moving forward.”
The crucible of caregiving had deepened her compassion.
“Part of the reason I chose to go into an MHA program was that experience of being with Dad during the hospital stays and doctor’s appointments,” she says. “I want to make a difference at the patient level in hospitals. When I walk through the halls and see families in patient rooms with their loved ones, I can sympathize because I can put myself in their shoes. Helping others is the driving force behind the ambition I have.”
Another part of that ambition is giving a leg up to students in Concordia’s MHA program. After graduating, Gupta became a loyal member of the MHA advisory board, attending “every single event” and helping the program’s curriculum to stay current given real-world conditions, says Sinardi.
“She also takes our students under her wing, mentors and advocates for them and introduces them to meaningful opportunities,” Sinardi says. “She’s a connector and will talk to students on the phone for hours, meet them for coffee, walk with them into networking events so they’re not nervous. She knows so many healthcare leaders and connects students to those leaders.”
Gupta is a firm believer in giving back.
“I feel very blessed and grateful that I have had so many mentors and sponsors who supported me along the way,” she says. “There was a time I was a student and felt really lost. When I interact with new students who are in the program, I regularly ask Cathi what I can do to continue to be involved. When I see new students, I can tell they are in the same shoes I was at one point. It’s important to me to share the knowledge and give the support I can. I want everyone to be successful as they start their career journeys.”
“It fills my cup and fulfills me,” she says. “In healthcare, we are facing an increasingly volatile environment so it’s also important for me to uplift the next generation of healthcare leaders.”
Gupta became the first Concordia MHA student to serve on the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) Board of Directors in the Southern California region, an “incredible honor that has opened the door for other students to follow her footsteps,” says Sinardi. Since then, many Concordia students and alumni have served on the ACHE board and student council.
Gupta is also the first Concordia alum to have her submissions selected to present at the ACHE Congress on Healthcare Leadership.
She spoke there on “Igniting Intergenerational Impact” and “Launching Your Career: Navigating the Post-Graduation Transition with Success.” Gupta also received the ACHE’s Service Award, President’s Award, and Regent’s Award, and was named the MHA program’s Alumnus of the Year in 2023. In addition, Keya was named 40 Under 40 by the Greater Irvine Chamber in 2024.
In Kassab’s view, “Keya could be a CEO. She could do whatever she wants to do.” For Gupta, the painful path life forced on her demonstrated what she may not have known otherwise. “I know I can manage a million chaotic things at once and still be successful,” she says. “That’s the perspective I bring to the table at these hospital systems. I truly feel I can walk through fire and come through on the other side.”