Seema Desai is a Research Associate at the Forum for Collaborative Research. She is an epidemiologist and biostatistician with expertise in longitudinal cohort methods, advanced statistical modeling, and multi-source data integration. She holds an MPH in Epidemiology and Biostatistics (GPA: 4.0) from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MD, with clinical experience in high-volume care settings in India.

Her research focuses on population-based studies of chronic diseases and clinical outcomes, including work on prenatal pesticide exposures and childhood leukemia survival — research that contributed to broader awareness of environmental risk factors in children — and longitudinal analyses of cardiometabolic risk during the menopausal transition using large multi-site cohorts. She led these research projects through to first-authored publications. Her medical thesis examined epidural steroid-based interventions for chronic low back pain, with findings that informed protocol adoption in the pain department. Her analytical and presentation toolkit includes R, SAS, ArcGIS, and data visualization dashboards, and she has teaching experience in graduate-level epidemiology and biostatistics.

She is particularly interested in translating population-based research into evidence-informed clinical and public health policy.