Exercise and Your Health – RPH Research Foundation

Discover things you never knew about the health effects of exercise and learn how it benefits you across your lifespan at this free community health event.

Our Speakers

Dr Daniel Green is a Winthrop Professor at The University of Western Australia and a Principal Research Fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. His 25-year career as a scientist started at Royal Perth Hospital where, with Roger Taylor and Gerry O’Driscoll, he established the first research-intensive cardiac rehabilitation service for heart failure and heart transplant patients in Australia. After stints at the Mayo Clinic and St George’s Hospital in London, Danny returned to The University of Western Australia where he established a centre for clinical trials of exercise and lifestyle interventions in humans.

He returned to the UK in the mid 2000s to accept the Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology in Liverpool, where he replicated his RPH and UWA experience by establishing clinical exercise physiology as an allied health profession in the NHS and in the higher education system. In the late 2000s Danny, once again, returned to Perth where he now holds an NHMRC Fellowship and leads a team of 20 staff and graduate students whose research encompasses the lifespan; from exercise training and physical activity in the prevention atherosclerosis in obese children and adolescents, to research on the best combination of exercise and medications in the management of patients with hypercholesterolemia, diabetes, coronary disease and heart failure patients awaiting transplantation.

Dr Louise Naylor is a researcher and senior lecturer at The University of Western Australia’s School of Human Sciences and an Exercise and Sports Science Australia Accredited Exercise Physiologist. She believes exercise is medicine and 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 disease. Childhood obesity and adolescents with Type 2 diabetes are another focus of her 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. In a growing and research-led field, her projects have spanned topics such as understanding how to optimise 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 personalised to be effective, and the difference between different individual responses to exercise programs and why some people don’t respond at all. As an ESSA Accredited Exercise Physiologist, Dr Naylor works as a Senior Exercise Physiologist in the Cardiac Rehabilitation Service at Fiona Stanley Hospital and is a member of UWA’s Cardiovascular Research Group.

A Q&A session will follow.