National Children’s Study Federal Advisory Committee Member
Dr. Ellenberg is a Professor of Biostatistics in the Division of Biostatistics in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Senior Scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and Associate Dean for Research Program Development, all at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He has almost 35 years of experience in the conduct and analysis of health studies, including observational studies, clinical trials, and health services research. He received his BS in Economics from the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in 1963, his AM in Statistics from Harvard University in 1964, and his PhD in Statistics from Harvard University in 1970. Prior to and since joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, his research interests have focused on the design, implementation, and analysis of observational clinical research studies.
Dr. Ellenberg’s research career began at the NIH, where for 26 years he focused on the design and analysis of large prospective observational studies. These included the significant advancement of the understanding of the etiology and prognosis of cerebral palsy (CP) and convulsive disorders in children. Much of this work derived from the National Institute of Neuorological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) Collaborative Perinatal Project (NCPP), which provided protocol structured observational data collected on 60,000 pregnant women during their pregnancies and 7-year follow-up of their children.
His collaborations with medical colleagues on evaluating prenatal, perinatal, and early developmental risk factors for cerebral palsy and convulsive disorders from the NCPP database forced the rethinking of many established paradigms. Specifically, his collaborative work in describing the risk of obstetric and labor and delivery factors for CP, the delineation of risk for CP related to asphyxia, and the risk of CP associated with low birthweight and twinning strongly influenced both the contemporary thinking and the foci of subsequent work in these areas. In his 1986 Presidential Address to the American Academy of Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine, Dr. Julius Richmond, former Surgeon General, said of the body of work of Nelson and Ellenberg “This work…has inserted a new excitement and intensity into the clinical and basic research directed at the cause of CP and development disabilities.” In a recent 50th Anniversary Issue of Pediatrics (Pediatrics 1998;102:262-264), two papers by Nelson and Ellenberg on the etiology of CP (Pediatrics 1981;67:36-44; NEJM 1986;315:81-86) were highlighted in a separate commentary for their enormous impact on the research in this area. The Commentator wrote, “During the 120 years between [William John Little’s] publication and that of Nelson and Ellenberg, a correlation between asphyxia neonatorum and CP was taken as a matter of faith. Nelson and Ellenberg showed that the majority of children even with low late Apgar scores did not end up with significant disabilities.”
Dr. Ellenberg has written and lectured extensively on issues affecting validity and inferential viability/generalizability in clinical research, including bias arising from subjects lost to follow-up, uniformity of methods of assessment across centers in multicenter studies, patient selection, missing data and completeness of reporting in clinical studies, and barriers to access to enrollment pools in observational studies.
His large body of peer-reviewed research papers and two edited books (Etiology of Parkinson’s Disease and Febrile Seizures) reflects his collaborative spirit and capability for bringing together groups with sometime disparate goals, and creating consensus. He is past President of the American Statistical Association and of the International Biometric Society, an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.