Prof Monique Kilkenny is a health services researcher and experienced epidemiologist with a background in health information management. She completed her PhD at Monash University in 2015. Recently, she was awarded an National Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship (2022-2025) and is a previous recipient of NHMRC Early Career Fellowship.  

Monique is the Head of the Big Data, Epidemiology and Prevention (Stroke and Ageing Research) at Monash University, and the projects she leads are essential to investigating quality of care provided to patients with stroke and are the cornerstones of informing the implementation of interventions to improve healthcare and patient outcomes. In 2019, she was awarded the Dean’s Award for Research Excellence (Enterprise) from the Faculty of Medicine (Monash University) in recognition of her work towards an integrated national data platform for stroke.

Her standing within the field of research is evidenced by her chief investigator’s role on successful NHMRC/MRFF grants. Monique’s group is at the forefront of data linkage research and she has been invited to speak at national and international conferences. She has been consulted by non-stroke research groups  about accessing and analysing big data. Monique setup and leads the Australia and New Zealand Stroke Coding Working Group and also co-leads the National Stroke Data Linkage Interest group. This group includes representatives from state and national health data linkage units, researchers using linked data, pharmacists, epidemiologists and statisticians around Australia.

Nationally, Monique is a leader and collaborates with other national researchers in the field of stroke using linked data, performance monitoring, quality improvement research and health promotion evaluations. Since 2007, she has been responsible for overseeing the analysis and report writing for audit reports for acute and rehabilitation services, and reports on the evaluation of the Know Your Numbers and StrokeSafe programs for the Stroke Foundation. These reports have been used to guide policy directions for improving prevention efforts and several quality of care initiatives in hospitals led by the Stroke Foundation and State government stroke clinical networks.

Prior to her career in stroke research, Monique was involved in epidemiological and health services research at a state/national/international level. Monique started her career working as a Health Information Manager managing a large registry (800,000 births). She was then employed as a Research Fellow and designed the first population-based clinical data on acne, wart, tinea and eczema in schoolchildren ever published in Australia. She then moved to France and played an important scientific role in the feasibility of the International Case-Control Study of mobile phones and head and neck tumours in 14 countries.

Monique is the Editor for Quality Improvement section for the Journal Stroke, the top-ranked international stroke journal and is on the Editorial Board for the Health Information Management Journal. She is also the Statistician on Data Safety Monitoring Boards for RCTs.