Ilka Riddle, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati Department of Pediatrics/Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and the Director of the University of Cincinnati Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities in the Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. She received her PhD in Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Delaware, with a focus on illness and disability and its impact on families. She is also a proud graduate of the 2013 Summer UCEDD Leadership Institute of the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities. Dr. Riddle spent her graduate-level training years and early career years at the Center for Disabilities Studies (CDS) at the University of Delaware before moving to the UCEDD at Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Ohio as Associate Director and since 2013, as the Director.

In her role as Director of the UCCEDD, she is responsible for providing guidance and leadership to staff and community partners for improving the health and lives of children and adults with disabilities on the local, state and national level; collaborate with internal and external partners; write reports; conduct research and policy work; apply for and secure state and federal funding and expand the impact of her UCEDD and the national network of UCEDDs across the country. Dr. Riddle has over eleven years of experience as the principal investigator and co-investigator on various federally and state funded grants, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Administration on Community Living, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Ohio Department of Health, the Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities, and foundation grants addressing system improvements for children and youth with developmental disabilities and special health care needs. Her research and project interests include health equity, health promotion and disease prevention for individuals with disabilities, healthcare transition and inclusion of individuals with disabilities across the lifespan in health care settings and activities. Most recently, she has also been engaged in work related to early childhood developmental monitoring and support for families of young children with challenging behaviors.

Her work spans from establishing educational family support programs, to partnerships with community and state agencies to improve child and adult health outcomes, to the development of an undergraduate certificate course in Developmental Disabilities with the School of Social Work at the University of Cincinnati, to researching health inequities experienced by people with disabilities with national partners, to impacting disability policy on the state and national levels. She is active on multiple state and national workgroups, advisory boards and councils, where she shares her expertise in developmental disabilities.