Professor Niki Ellis is an occupational physician and a public health physician. After two years in clinical roles as a junior doctor she moved into public health policy and strategy roles for a decade: first with the Tasmanian Department of Health and then with the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission. The next ten years were spent in the private sector, building up a strategic health consultancy across the Eastern seaboard of Australia, which she sold to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Niki has always had an interest in evidence-based health care, but her work in implementation science began in the UK, where she worked on health services innovation at London South Bank University and the Department of Health in the early 2000s. She returned from the UK to take up a chair at the University of Queensland. In this role she led the establishment of the Centre for Military and Veterans’ Health, a joint venture between the Departments of Defence, Veterans’ Affairs and UQ, University of Adelaide and Charles Darwin University. After five years she moved to Melbourne and Monash University where she was the foundation professor and CEO of the Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research. This Institute, along with another, was awarded, for Monash University, the prestigious Ashley Goldsworthy award for engagement with industry by a university in 2012. ISCRR was also invited to present its collaborative research model at the National Health and Medical Research Council’s first meeting of its Research Translation Faculty, as a case study. Niki has retained an adjunct appointment at the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at Monash. In recent years she has extended her interests to include the practical application of collective impact theory to work disability, and the emerging field of measuring social impact. Niki has had several opportunities to work with one of the leading futurists of the world, Professor Sohail Inayatullah. Specifically on the development of plausible futures in military and veterans health, workplace health and safety, Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander health and optometry. In addition to joining the board for the Centre for Evidence and Implementation, Niki is a non-executive director for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, SuperFriend and DrinkWise; and is a member of the advisory board for the Faculty of Medicine and Health Science at Bond University. She is also the Work for Health Advisor to Comcare.
Niki has been on the Centre for Evidence and Implementation Board since 2019.