Professor Maria Inacio

Prof Inacio is an epidemiologist with research interests in the areas of population health surveillance systems (i.e. registries) and utilisation of existing data and informatics to enhance these systems. She is the Director of the Registry of Senior Australians (ROSA) at SAHMRI, Adjunct Research Professor at University of South Australia, and a Hospital Research Foundation Mid-Career Fellow and NHMRC Emerging Leadership 2 Fellow. ROSA is a SA-based Clinical Quality Registry developed to support the monitoring and evaluation of the quality of ageing and aged care services provided to older Australians. Prof Inacio’s work has the goal of identifying good models of care, areas in need of improvement, risk factors for poor health outcomes, and opportunities to improve health and wellbeing of older Australians accessing aged care services.  

Prof Inacio was trained as an epidemiologist at the Dartmouth Centre for Evaluative Clinical Sciences (MS 2002) and University of California, San Diego (PhD 2013).  Between 2004-2015 Prof Inacio worked at Kaiser Permanente, the US largest integrated healthcare provider, in the development of orthopaedic registries. She led the development of the largest US Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction Registry, the Kaiser Permanente Hip Fracture Registry, and conducted research on leveraging administrative, electronic medical record data, and informatics for population surveillance.

Prof Inacio has collaborations with several national and international institutions including Kaiser Permanente in the US, Swedish Hip Register, Australian Orthopaedic Association National Joint Replacement Registry, University of Melbourne SMART Registry, Australian Dementia Network, and Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. She also works closely with aged care providers in Australia, including ECH Inc, Silver Chain and Helping Hand. She is an editor for the Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research journal since 2014 and is a current Associate Member (mentee) of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. In her career, she has been awarded several grants, including multiple grants as CIA from NHMRC and MRFF, published over 160 scientific articles, and been awarded several institutional (2019 SAHMRI Research Translation, Diane Ranck Leadership, and Mid-Career Awards) and national (2020 Information Technology in Aged Care Award, 2020 SA Young Tall Poppy Science Award, 2021 Women of the Year-Top Innovator Award Sunday Mail/Advertiser) awards.

Australian Association of Gerontology (AAG)

International Epidemiological Association (IEA)

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy University of California, San Diego

• Masters of Evaluative Clinical Sciences Dartmouth College

• Bachelor of Science (Biochemistry/Cell Biology) University of California, San Diego