Rate My Professor Ross Wilkie

Professor Ross Wilkie is Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology in the School of Medicine at Keele University. He qualified as a physiotherapist in 1992 from Queens’ College, Glasgow, obtained a postgraduate diploma in Biomechanics from the University of Strathclyde in 1994, completed his PhD in Epidemiology in 2006, and held a Research Councils UK postdoctoral fellowship. In his current roles, he leads research programmes on health surveillance, health inequalities, and health and work, and serves as Director of Public Health programmes, which encompass the Global Health Grand Challenge pathway, Master of Public Health (offered both online and face-to-face), and Professional Doctorate in Public Health. He is also Deputy Director of the Keele Institute for Social Inclusion.

Wilkie's research specializations include measuring the impact of musculoskeletal conditions and pain on individuals and populations, their links to broader health determinants, health inequalities, and the extent and causes of lost work participation due to these conditions, particularly in relation to healthy working life expectancy. He examines the burden of musculoskeletal conditions concerning physical activity, healthy ageing, social participation, and work disability. As chief investigator, he has led major projects such as the PRELIM study funded by Versus Arthritis, the MIDAS study supported by the Nuffield Oliver Bird Foundation, and a programme on healthy working life expectancy funded by the NIHR and the Nuffield Foundation with Versus Arthritis. Key publications include "The Keele Assessment of Participation: a new instrument to measure participation restriction in population studies" (2005) and "Projections of healthy working life expectancy in England to the year 2035" (2022). His contributions have earned him the EULAR Health Professionals in Rheumatology Award in 2019 for research on osteoarthritis and mortality, and Fellowship of the Faculty of Public Health by distinction for combining research, education, and collaboration with public health practitioners. He serves on the editorial board of Arthritis Care and Research and has previously been a member of the British Society for Rheumatology Heberden Committee and British Health Professionals in Rheumatology. His internationally recognized work advances health surveillance and health-and-work research to address health inequalities.