Select Page

Usha Govindarajulu

Assistant Professor of Biostatistics

Balancing a Creative Mind with Scientific Precision

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 interests in survival analysis, frailty models, smoothing, and genetic epidemiology. 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.

About Usha Govindarajulu

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 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, she 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. There she worked on a project comparing smoothing methods fit within Cox models and developing 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, She 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. Her responsibilities ranged from grant writing, design and analysis to power calculations, protocol review and collaboration on many research projects. In 2010 Usha Gavindarajulu 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 to her current position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at SUNY Downstate School of Public Health in New York, NY. Where she taught advanced biostatistics courses that focus on survival analysis, categorical data analysis, and statistical computing. In addition to her teaching duties, Usha conducts original research and collaborates with other medical investigators. She is Currently Senior Faculty at Mount Sinai Center for Biostatistics.

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 Who’s Who of America list as well as the Who’s Who of America Top Educator. In her spare time, she continues the 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.