Leona is a senior exercise physiologist in the pulmonary rehabilitation program at Austin Health in Melbourne. She completed her PhD in ‘Therapeutic interventions in interstitial lung disease. Exercise training and supplemental oxygen’ through the La Trobe University, Melbourne. For her PhD she led a multi‐site randomised controlled trial which defined the benefits of pulmonary rehabilitation for ILD across disease subgroups, published in 2017 in Thorax.

Leona currently holds a postdoctoral position Monash University, under Prof Anne Holland. Her main role is to develop and conduct the first randomised controlled trial, across four Australian centres, comparing the  clinical benefits of a high intensity interval training protocol to the standard continuous exercise training method used in pulmonary rehabilitation in people with fibrotic interstitial lung disease.