Penelope Dennehy, MD
- Medical School: Tufts University School of Medicine
- Residency: Rhode Island Hospital
- Fellowship: Boston Children’s Hospital
Penelope Dennehy, MD is a Professor and Vice Chair of Pediatrics at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She is currently the Associate Director of the Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program at Hasbro Children’s Hospital and
Dr. Dennehy received her medical degree from Tufts University School of Medicine and served her pediatric residency at Rhode Island Hospital. She completed a combined pediatric-medical infectious diseases fellowship at Children’s Hospital Medical Center-Beth Israel Hospital in Boston.
In 1982, she joined Rhode Island Hospital, where she founded and directed the diagnostic virology laboratory and was an attending physician on both the adult and pediatric infectious disease services. She was the Director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases from 2014 to 2019.
Dr. Dennehy’s primary research interests include the study of viral gastroenteritis and viral respiratory diseases. She has been involved in clinical trials of vaccines against rotavirus, influenza, and varicella (chickenpox). She has also studied the epidemiology and prevention of rotavirus infections, clinical diagnostic testing for rotavirus, and the epidemiology and etiology of viral gastroenteritis in hospitalized children. She has been an active member of the Collaborative Antiviral Study Group, a National Institutes of Health-funded, multicenter clinical trials group.
She has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, written book chapters, and presented many abstracts at national and international venues. Dr. Dennehy is a past president of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society and a past secretary of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. She served as a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases and was a founding editor of the AAP’s PREP:ID online self-assessment for infectious disease subspecialists.
In addition to her contributions to the scientific literature, Dr. Dennehy has received numerous accolades for her superior teaching skills, including five Dean’s Teaching Excellence Awards from the Alpert Medical School and a Lifetime Teaching Award from the Department of Pediatrics in 2019.