Usha Govindarajulu, PhD
Professor of Biostatistics
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 Usha's 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, Usha 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. Usha 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.