3 things to know about Usha Vance, wife of US Vice President-elect JD Vance

Usha's parents emigrated from Andhra Pradesh to the US around 1980. Shruti Rajagopalan, an economist at the Mercatus Centre of George Mason University, wrote about her family’s origins in an article on Substack.

“Usha Chilukuri, (was) born in San Diego, to Indian-born Telugu-speaking professors. Her father, Krish Chilukuri, is an aerospace engineer from the prestigious IIT Madras. His father, Chilukuri Ramasastry, was a member of IIT’s founding faculty and the best student prize in physics memorialized in his name. Usha’s mother, Lakshmi, is a marine biologist and now provost at one of the colleges in UC San Diego. Usha’s great aunt Shanthamma Chilukuri, now 96, continues her career as a physics professor in Visakhapatnam,” she wrote.

Sastry’s younger brother, Dr Chilukuri Subramanya Sastry, retired as a professor in the Telugu Department at Andhra University and passed away in 2009, as The Indian Express earlier reported. He was also the chief of the RSS unit in Andhra Pradesh.

According to a report in The New York Times, Usha had a reputation for being both a “leader” and a “bookworm” since her childhood. Another profile said the members of the Indian American community around her in San Diego were of a similar background: “The women were avid readers and would often gather to discuss novels, while the men traded tips for growing tropical fruits like guavas and mangoes”.

She studied history at Yale University. It was followed by an MPhil at the University of Cambridge on a Gates Fellowship where, according to The NYT, she moved in “mostly liberal and left-wing circles”. However, she has not publicly spoken about her political views in recent years, beyond support for her husband.

From 2010 to 2013, Usha was at the Yale Law School — where she met JD Vance.

Before joining politics, Vance was known for writing a best-selling memoir titled ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ in 2016. He recounted growing up in a poor family, the society around him and their problems. Despite challenges, Vance earned an undergraduate degree and was accepted into Yale Law School.

He wrote: “I fell hard for a classmate of mine named Usha. As luck would have it, we were assigned as partners for our first major writing assignment, so we spent a lot of time during that first year getting to know each other. She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful.”

Vance called Usha his “Yale spirit guide”, who made him feel comfortable at the elite institution. “In a place that always seemed a little foreign, Usha’s presence made me feel at home,” he wrote. BBC also reported, “She… said her husband was a ‘meat and potatoes kind of guy’ - but one who had adapted to her vegetarian diet and even learned how to cook Indian food for her mother.”

In the book’s acknowledgements, he wrote of Usha: “So much of the credit for both this book and the happy life I lead belongs to her.”

Usha has worked in the legal field as a Supreme Court clerk and Associate at law firms. In sections of mainstream US media, she has been described as someone who lends diversity to the Republican ticket of Trump and Vance.

John Zogby, a pollster and author, told The Guardian: “Second lady candidates hardly ever figure into the mix. However, Indian Americans are rising in influence in the United States. They’re heavily Democratic – or at least they have been – in their voting patterns so if there’s an opportunity to chip away at that and even get a small percentage that could be vital”.

In terms of the image she has projected thus far, her unique style has been of note, especially in comparison to other women involved in the campaign, including Melania and Ivanka Trump. “The rare photos of her until now suggest someone who isn’t particularly interested in using her clothes to attract attention, but rather to effectively get her through the day… as if she was not that fussed about fashion. Just, as she has said, she is not that fussed about politics,” The NYT reported.