Dr Louise Naylor is a Professor at UWA’s School of Human Sciences and an Exercise and Sports Science Australia (ESSA) Accredited Exercise Physiologist. She is passionate about exercise as medicine and advocates that exercise can be used to treat, prevent or reduce the impact of chronic disease. Her research explores how exercise training can contribute to rehabilitating and improving health outcomes in individuals with, or at risk of, cardiovascular and metabolic disease. Exercise as medicine for childhood cancer survivors is another focus of her clinical and research work.

After completing her undergraduate degree and PhD at UWA, Dr Naylor commenced her research career working with both elite athletes and chronically ill individuals with conditions such as heart failure and obesity. Her research investigated how exercise can improve health and wellbeing, quality of life, depression and anxiety. Since then, her research focuses on the optimization of exercise for individuals, across a variety of clinical groups, with an emphasis on cardiovascular and metabolic adaptations to exercise. In a growing and research-led field, her projects have spanned topics such as understanding how to optimize prescriptions for survivors of cancer, patients with heart failure, ageing men, and patients with diabetes.

Her research further investigates the need for exercise programs to be personalized to be effective, and the difference between different individual responses to exercise programs and why some people don’t respond at all. This research agenda is supported by ongoing work in athletes which allow her team to generate a more comprehensive understanding of the cardiovascular system with exercise training. Dr Naylor’s basic science research adds further mechanistic insights into the regulation of the cardiovascular system and generate a multifaceted understanding of cardiac and vascular exercise physiology.

Dr. Naylor is the co-lead of the Cardiovascular Research Group at UWA, a dedicated team of researchers and clinicians working at the forefront of cardiovascular disease prevention and management to optimize human health and wellbeing. The Cardiovascular Research Group includes a diverse team of postdoctoral and graduate students and staff from Australia and around the world, working towards our mission to combine translational research with service provision and vocational training to drive evidence, train the next generation of preventative specialists, deliver healthcare and impact patient benefit.

Putting her research into practice, as an ESSA Accredited Exercise Physiologist, Dr Naylor works as a Senior Exercise Physiologist in the Cardiac Rehabilitation Service at Fiona Stanley Hospital and the Healthy hearts program at UWA.