Ilana Ackerman is a Professor (Research) in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University and Deputy Director of the Musculoskeletal Health Unit.  

Ilana is a musculoskeletal epidemiologist and an experienced orthopaedic physiotherapist. She completed her PhD at The University of Melbourne in 2006. To support her research, she has been awarded an NHMRC Public Health Early Career Fellowship (2008-2015), a mid-career Victorian Health and Medical Research Fellowship (2018-2022), and a 2022 Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship from Monash University (Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences).

Ilana has led an important program of clinical and population-based research designed to quantify the personal and societal burden of hip and knee osteoarthritis, forecast trends in arthritis and joint replacement surgery, and evaluate the outcomes of joint replacement. Her research has been supported by competitive funding from the NHMRC, HCF Research Foundation, Victorian Government, Arthritis Australia, Musculoskeletal Australia, and the Physiotherapy Research Foundation. Her research findings have been published in leading international orthopaedic surgery, rheumatology and physiotherapy journals and she has received a range of research awards for her work. Ilana is strongly committed to clinical researcher training and has a longstanding record of positive engagement with clinicians and health services.

Ilana has held osteoarthritis expert roles for the Global Burden of Disease studies and was an invited member of the working group that developed the ICHOM Standard Set for Hip and Knee Osteoarthritis. She has held key advisory roles at national and state levels, with the overarching aim of improving the quality of care for people with osteoarthritis. Ilana was involved in the initial development and recent update of the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care's Osteoarthritis of the Knee Clinical Care Standards and the Victorian Model of Care for Osteoarthritis, and was a Steering Committee member for the National Strategic Action Plan for Arthritis.  Ilana is the Patient-Reported Outcome Measures Advisor to the Australian Orthopaedic Association National Joint Replacement Registry and the co-Chair of the International Society of Arthroplasty Registries Patient-Reported Outcomes Working Group. 

She is a member of the Osteoarthritis Research Society International (OARSI) Publications Committee and an International Editorial Advisory Board member for the Journal of Patient-Reported Outcomes. She is the immediate past Chair of the Journal of Physiotherapy Editorial Board.

Featured podcasts

Joint Action podcast with Ilana Ackerman - November 2024

E3 Rehab podcast with Ilana Ackerman - October 2024                        

Joint Action podcast with Ilana Ackerman - April 2022