Susan S. Ellenberg

Susan S. Ellenberg is an American statistician specializing in the design of clinical trials and in the safety of medical products.

She is a professor of biostatistics, medical ethics and health policy in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 1993 president of the Society for Clinical Trials and the 1999 President of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society.

Education and career

Ellenberg graduated from Radcliffe College in 1967. She earned a master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and became a high school mathematics teacher. She stopped teaching to raise a family, and began working as a computer programmer for Jerome Cornfield at George Washington University, something she could do while working from home.

She became a graduate student at George Washington University, completing a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics there in 1980,

while continuing to work for Cornfield.

She joined the National Cancer Institute in 1982,

and in 1988 moved to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as chief of the newly founded Biostatistics Branch of the Division of AIDS. While attending an International AIDS Conference in Montreal, Ellenberg obtained an ACT UP Treatment Research Agenda about humanizing drug trials. She shared copies with a working group of statisticians at NIH and FDA, quickly supplemented by AIDS activists and interested clinicians, to discuss improved approaches to AIDS clinical research. For her role in AIDS research, Ellenberg was featured in the film How to Survive a Plague.