Professor Maria Inacio

Prof Inacio is an epidemiologist with expertise in population health surveillance, registry science, health and aged care services research. She is the Director of the Registry of Senior Australians (ROSA) Research Centre at SAHMRI, Matthew Flinders Professor of Health Services and Epidemiology at Flinders University Caring Futures Institute, and a NHMRC Emerging Leadership 2 Fellow. Prof Inacio was trained 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 largest integrated healthcare provider in the US, in the development of registries.

Since 2017 Prof Inacio has developed the ROSA Research Centre program and team. ROSA is a national platform and 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 research has resulted in significant contributions to the understanding of the individuals in the aged care sector nationally and how quality and safety of care can be efficiently monitored for this sector. Prof Inacio and the ROSA team have delivered several reports to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety and Department of Health and Aged Care that have informed federal level recommendations and new national program design regarding quality and safety monitoring for the aged care sector.

Prof Inacio has collaborated 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 (e.g. ECH Inc, Silverchain, Bolton Clarke) and peak bodies (e.g. ACCPA) in Australia. Since 2021, Prof Inacio has been a founding member of the Australian Consortium for Aged Care (ACAC), which includes leading national aged care research groups (e.g., University of Queensland, Macquarie University), and leads its first MRFF funded study the ‘ACAC Quality Measurement Toolbox’.

In her career, she has been awarded several competitive grants, including grants as CIA from NHMRC and MRFF, published over 215 scientific articles, which are highly cited, making her one of the 2022 Stanford/Elsevier’s Top 2% most cited scientists internationally. Prof Inacio has also 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 The Advertiser Sunday Mail’s Woman of the Year- Top Innovator) awards. She is an editor for the Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research journal since 2014 and was a Deputy Medical Editor for the Medical Journal of Australian between 2022 and 2024. She was a Hospital Research Foundation Mid-career Fellow between 2020 and 2023 and Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science Mentee between 2019 and 2023.