Gita Thanarajasingam (MD)

Dr. Gita Thanarajasingam is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and consultant in the Division of Hematology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.  She is a graduate of Yale University and Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine, and completed her internal medicine residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School. After Hematology/Oncology Fellowship and Advanced Lymphoma Fellowship at Mayo Clinic, she joined the faculty of the Mayo Lymphoma disease-oriented group. Her clinical practice as an oncologist is focused on Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and she performs health outcomes research in lymphoma and other cancers.  

As a clinical investigator, her work focuses on improving the evaluation of adverse events (AEs) of treatment and measuring their impact on treatment tolerability cancer patients. She developed the Toxicity over Time (ToxT), a longitudinal patient-focused approach to AE evaluation.  She is active in the implementation of patient-reported outcomes to better understand treatment toxicity and tolerability.  She serves of as vice co-chair of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology Health Outcomes Committee and is the recipient of K and U01 grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health in support of her work. She leads the ongoing international multi-stakeholder Lancet Haematology Commission, “Beyond maximum grade: modernizing the assessment and reporting of adverse events in hematological malignancies.” She is currently the lead principal investigator of a project in collaboration with the United States Food and Drug Administration evaluating physical functioning in cancer patients with clinician-reports, PRO and wearable device data.  Her research program overall endeavors to improve the accuracy and patient-centeredness of AE evaluation and better understand cancer treatment tolerability from the patient’s perspective.