Ellen Caniglia, ScD

Dr. Ellen Caniglia is an epidemiologist specializing in causal inference methods and perinatal, HIV, and pharmacoepidemiology. Her work integrates methodological innovation with substantive investigation: she develops and extends causal inference methods and applies them to questions about medication safety, treatment effectiveness, and policy and lifestyle interventions in pregnant populations and people living with HIV — groups that are frequently excluded from the randomized trials that generate most of the evidence guiding medical decision-making.

Dr. Caniglia received her ScD in Epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where her doctoral research focused on dynamic treatment and monitoring strategies for HIV. She joined Penn in 2021 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, and is a member of both the Center for Health Innovations in Reproductive and Perinatal Population Research (CHIRP) and the Center for Real-World Effectiveness and Safety of Therapeutics (CREST).

She has contributed data informing global HIV treatment guidelines, including evidence on the comparative safety of antiretroviral medications in pregnancy, through work in the Tsepamo Study in Botswana, a birth outcomes surveillance study of more than 300,000 births. Past NICHD-funded work (K01) examined antenatal micronutrient supplementation in Botswana, including mixed methods research and a pilot implementation-effectiveness intervention to provide supplementation at antenatal clinics.

Dr. Caniglia currently serves as Principal Investigator on two R01s and a PCORI-funded methods project. The R01s investigate preconception lifestyle interventions to reduce adverse pregnancy outcomes and the safety and effectiveness of maternity telehealth on reducing severe maternal morbidity, both using target trial emulation and large administrative datasets. The PCORI-funded work focuses on developing methods to reconcile conflicting results across randomized trials — a challenge that currently lacks established analytic guidance. Future directions include applying and extending these methods to additional pairs of conflicting trials.

Dr. Caniglia teaches the core advanced epidemiologic methods course in the Penn Epidemiology PhD program and mentors PhD students and postdoctoral fellows in CHIRP and the Center for Causal Inference (CCI). She also teaches causal inference methods in CCI and CREST summer institutes. She serves as Associate Editor of the American Journal of Epidemiology and on the Editorial Board of Epidemiology.