Ushma Upadhyay, PhD, MPH

Assistant Professor

Email: upadhyayu@obgyn.ucsf.edu

Biosketch:

Dr. Upadhyay is Assistant Professor and a Public Health Social Scientist at ANSIRH. Her work encompasses two overarching themes: the effects of women's empowerment and gender equity on reproductive health and improving access to contraception and abortion care for vulnerable populations. Her current research focuses on understanding and documenting the impact of state-level abortion restrictions on women’s lives. In particular she focuses on restrictions related to medication-abortion and ultrasound requirements. She is also studying the safety of abortion using Medi-Cal data from California State’s Medicaid program to determine the need for regulations.  Dr. Upadhyay’s research interests also focus on measures of women’s empowerment and assessing its influence on contraceptive use, abortion decisions, and fertility. Dr. Upadhyay has developed a theory-based, validated scale to quantitatively measure reproductive autonomy that researchers can incorporate into interview assessments in a variety of evaluations and research contexts. She is co-author of Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers, a Johns Hopkins/WHO/USAID publication providing evidence-based guidance on the provision of contraceptive methods. Dr. Upadhyay has a BA in Communications and International Studies from American University, a Masters in Public Health from Columbia School of Public Health, and a PhD from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Areas of Interest:

• Unintended Pregnancy
• State-level Restrictions on Abortion
• Sexual Relationship Power
• Reproductive Autonomy
• Barriers to Access of Contraception and Abortion
• Medi-Cal Data

For a complete list of publications, please click here: Publications on PubMed


Updated December 2013