In this episode, Susan Ellenberg, emerita professor of biostatistics, medical ethics, and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, describes her lifelong love of mathematics, how she accidentally became a biostatistician, and her well-rounded career in clinical trial design and analysis.
As a child, Ellenberg was fascinated by a mathematical puzzle.
John is twice Mary's age when John was Mary's age. When Mary will be John's age, the sum of their ages will be 63. How old are John and Mary?
Ellenberg occasionally chipped away at the question by randomly plugging in numbers, but she soon discovered another way to approach it.
“When I got to high school algebra, I learned that there was an actual way to solve this problem. I was so excited I knew how to do it,” Ellenberg said.
That enthusiasm, combined with her college entrance exam math scores—which topped her graduating class, despite not being in the math honors program—led her to become a math teacher.
But Ellenberg soon put her career on hold so she and her husband could start their young family.
However, when Ellenberg was pregnant with her first child, a friend asked if she could help with computer programming for a project under the eminent biostatistician Jerome Cornfield.
That job led to Ellenberg earning a PhD in mathematical statistics and having a career in clinical trial design and analysis. She has held positions at the Emmes Clinical Research Organization, NIH, and FDA. She also worked with activists during the AIDS epidemic and has combatted misinformation about vaccine safety.
Eventually, though, she took a job in academia and returned to her first passion: teaching.
“I said I would teach a class on clinical trials, which I did all the years until I became emeritus,” Ellenberg said. “I really enjoyed doing that, [going] back to my original love of teaching.”
Ellenberg spoke with McKenzie Prillaman, reporter at The Cancer Letter. A transcript of this conversation appears on the Cancer History Project.