Dr. Usha Govindarajulu
Dr. Usha Govindarajulu is an accomplished biostatistician and professor with over 20 years of experience in the industry coupled with a highly creative background in writing and theatre production. She specializes in cardiology, allergy/immunology, and radiology and has specific expertise in survival analysis and frailty models along with interests in smoothing, genetic epidemiology, and machine learning. Usha Govindarajulu is a highly motivated professional who never sets limits on her abilities and strives to live a life full of professional success as well as creativity.
As a professional of her caliber, it comes as no surprise that Dr. Usha Govindarajulu places a high value on her education. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biology & Society from Cornell University and initially an M.S in Natural Resources from the University of Michigan. She then worked in various roles for different environmental organizations, including work for the EPA.
Finding she had a strong quantitative aptitude, she decided to switch fields and obtained an M.S. in Biostatistics from George Washington University, and finally a a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from Boston University. During her doctoral work, Usha Govindarajulu served as a research assistant position with the Framingham Heart Study where she focused on modeling atrial fibrillation data and developing new frailty models. After receiving her doctorate, she went on to post-doctoral work at Harvard School of Public Health in Biostatistics. At this institution, she worked on a project comparing smoothing methods fit within Cox models and developed a method for such comparison. She simultaneously worked on a genetic epidemiology project that examined the impact of genotyping error on bias in haplotype odds ratio estimates from studies of unrelated individuals.
After conducting such exciting research, Dr. Usha Govindarajulu began to garner interest from more and more prestigious organizations. In 2006, Usha accepted a position as a Research Faculty member at Yale Medical School where she specialized in biostatistics to assist the medical program in many capacities from design to analysis of research plans and collaborations with physicians. Later, she provided statistics support to clinical investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and had a faculty appointment there.
Her responsibilities ranged from grant writing, design and analysis to power calculations, protocol review and collaboration on many research projects. In 2010, Usha Govindarajulu had some transition in research between working at the the John Hancock Research Center staff at Tufts University as a Senior Statistician where she provided support and guidance in a number of areas, doing research for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and teaching part-time at Northeastern University. She continued her work at the Brigham during all of this until finally settling in a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at SUNY Downstate School of Public Health in New York, NY. There she taught advanced biostatistics courses that focus on survival analysis, categorical data analysis, and statistical computing. In addition to her teaching duties, she conducted original research and collaborated with other medical investigators.
Dr. Govindarajulu then left this position and took on a role as Senior Faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the Department of Population Health, more specifically, the Center for Biostatistics. Here she continues collaborations with medical investigators and also conducts methods research, as well as teaching in the Masters program.
Outside of her teaching responsibilities, Dr. Usha Govindarajulu has over 40 published works featuring her research. She frequently gives presentations on her areas of expertise and research at various conferences across the country. Usha has won awards since the beginning of her career and continues to be recognized for her exceptional work each year. Recently she was featured in the American Statistical Association’s Women in Statistics in 2020. Also she has been on the Who’s Who of America list as well as the Who’s Who list of America’s Top Educator. In her spare time, she continues her creative writing and has written and produced eight comedy shorts and plays. Usha Govindarajulu frequently participates in community service projects and helps raises money for charity through her theatrical productions.
Usha Govindarajulu has dedicated her life to education and helping others in the forms of science and comedy. She is an advocate for women’s research and health. Usha uses her prominent position in academia to persuade students to get into the biostatistics field and change the world. There are not enough women in the field of biostatistics and Usha Govindarajulu is trying to change that by educating her students, and sharing her accomplishments with them.
Usha Govindarajulu believes that both comedy and biostatistics have the ability to change the world in different ways, so she spends her time trying to figure each one out.
