Rate My Professor Joanna Dipnall

Dr Joanna Dipnall serves as a Senior Lecturer in the Clinical Registries group at Monash University’s School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences. An accomplished applied statistician, her research focuses on machine and deep learning techniques, particularly in analyzing registry and linked medical data. She earned her Bachelor of Economics with Honours in Econometrics from Monash University and her PhD from Deakin University’s School of Medicine, IMPACT Strategic Research Centre, during which she pioneered the Risk Index for Depression (RID) using blended machine learning and statistical approaches. Dipnall chairs the SPHPM Machine Learning Community of Practice Group and collaborates with the Faculty of Information Technology to supervise postgraduate students integrating AI into health research. As Primary Course Director and Senior Lecturer for the Masters of Health Data Analytics, she coordinates a multidisciplinary program drawing from public health, IT, and business economics. Her professional journey includes teaching advanced statistical methods at universities, ACSPRI, and NZSSN, as well as commercial roles as a statistical consultant and founder of an early internet-based research business in 1999. She also holds an honorary Postdoctoral Research Fellow position at Barwon Health since 2017.

Dipnall is Chief Investigator on several impactful projects, including the NHMRC-funded PRAISE study predicting fracture outcomes with AI-supplemented models, the ACTION study advancing injury care, BRIDGE-ED for emergency care inclusivity, and initiatives on opioid poisoning surveillance. Author of 55 journal articles, four conference papers, and more, her influential publications encompass “The association between dietary patterns, diabetes and depression” (Journal of Affective Disorders, 2015), “Fusing data mining, machine learning and traditional statistics to detect biomarkers associated with depression” (PLoS One, 2016), “Into the bowels of depression: unravelling medical symptoms associated with depression” (PLoS One, 2016), and recent contributions like “An assessment of skeletal fracture patterning resulting from fatal motorcycle crashes” (International Journal of Legal Medicine, 2026) and “Exploring interaction effects of social determinants of health with hospital admission type on academic performance” (Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2025). With over 1,000 citations on Google Scholar, her work significantly impacts biostatistics, mental health, injury epidemiology, and public health. She engages in peer review for journals such as PLoS ONE, BMC Endocrine Disorders, and serves as guest editor for Mathematics.