Usha Govindarajulu
Senior Faculty, Mount Sinai Center for Biostatistics

Educational Background
PhD, Biostatistics, Boston University
MS, Natural Resources, University of Michigan
MS, Biostatistics, The George Washington University
Postdoctoral Work, Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health
AB, Biology and Society, Cornell University

Usha Govindarajulu was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky. Her interest in statistics came from her father, who was a longtime statistician and professor. He inspired her to switch from biology to biostatistics, which he thought would allow her to combine both biology and statistics. She came to enjoy the field while studying for a master’s degree and continued on to do a doctorate.

One of Govindarajulu’s greatest impacts has been in frailty models, especially with her tutorial in frailty models, which has received international attention. Frailty models are special types of survival models that allow incorporating unmeasured confounding or unexplained heterogeneity that has not been captured by the measured covariates. These models have also been useful to researchers who want to understand how they can be used when one has information available about family/genetic structure and then applied in a correlated frailty model. Having become an expert in this area, Govindarajulu was most recently asked to write a review article about current research in survival models and frailty models, highlighting advantages and disadvantages from her perspective.

Finally, from the learning curve research in cardiac device safety she has been conducting, Govindarajulu generated three first-author publications in which she extended the method to survival analysis. This research gained repeated interest from US Food and Drug Administration statisticians when they saw the research presented at the Joint Statistical Meetings from 2017–2019. Govindarajulu’s research was also featured in a syndicated national radio broadcast called “Public Health Minute” and continues to be featured on their website.