Dr. Susan S. Ellenberg Named Interim Chair of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics
September 18, 2019
To:Penn Medicine Faculty, Students and Staff
From:J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD
Jonathan Epstein, MD
We are pleased to announce that Susan S. Ellenberg, PhD, will serve as interim chair of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics (DBEI), as Dr. Harv Feldman completes his six-year term and we begin a national search for his successor. Dr. Ellenberg will assume the role of interim Chair on October 1.
Dr. Ellenberg has been a DBEI faculty member since 2004, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy. For many years, she served the Perelman School of Medicine as Associate Dean for Clinical Research.
Dr. Ellenberg’s research has focused on practical problems and ethical issues in designing, conducting and analyzing data from clinical trials. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Society for Clinical Trials and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.
Dr. Ellenberg is the 2019 recipient of the Florence Nightingale David Award, a biannual award given jointly by the major North American statistical societies to a female statistician for outstanding achievements. At Penn, in addition to her teaching and administrative duties, she serves as senior statistician for several multicenter clinical trials and directs the Biostatistics Core of the Penn Center for AIDS Research. She also chairs the organizing committee for the annual Penn conference on statistical issues in clinical trials.
Prior to her appointment at Penn, Dr. Ellenberg held several senior level positions in the federal government, including Director of the Office of Biostatistics and Epidemiology in the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the first Chief of the Biostatistics Research Branch in the Division of AIDS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
We will convene a search committee this fall for the next Chair of DBEI, which Mitchell Schnall, MD, PhD, the Eugene P. Pendergrass Professor of Radiology and Chair of the Radiology Department, has graciously agreed to chair.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Ellenberg and thanking her for taking on this interim role. We would again like to thank Dr. Harv Feldman for his leadership of the department for the past six years.