Rate My Professor Zoe McKeough

Associate Professor Zoe McKeough is a distinguished physiotherapist and academic in the Discipline of Physiotherapy, Sydney School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney. She earned her BAppSc (Physio) with distinction in 1998 and PhD in 2004, joining the University as an academic in 2005 after clinical positions in the Departments of Respiratory Medicine and Physiotherapy at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. McKeough's research centers on pulmonary rehabilitation for individuals with chronic lung diseases, with a strong emphasis on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Her work explores diverse exercise modalities, including upper limb training, water-based exercise, tai chi, ground walking, telerehabilitation, and mobile health pulmonary rehabilitation (m-PR). She has published 85 peer-reviewed journal articles, two book chapters, and 126 peer-reviewed abstracts. Among her highly cited works are the Australian and New Zealand Pulmonary Rehabilitation Guidelines (Respirology, 2017, 402 citations), Home-based telerehabilitation via real-time videoconferencing improves endurance exercise capacity in patients with COPD: the randomized controlled TeleR Study (Respirology, 2017, 316 citations), and Water-based exercise in COPD with physical comorbidities: a randomised controlled trial (European Respiratory Journal, 2013, 176 citations).

McKeough has attracted over $2.8 million in research funding, including two major National Health and Medical Research Council project grants on exercise training in COPD. She has supervised nine PhD students to completion and currently mentors five more. As a reviewer for more than ten international respiratory and physiotherapy journals, she advances the field through rigorous peer review. In 2022, she was awarded the prestigious REDI Fellowship, collaborating with Perx Health to develop Perx-R, an evidence-based scalable mobile health platform for pulmonary rehabilitation and self-management in chronic respiratory diseases. McKeough holds leadership roles as Managing Director of the Better Breathing Foundation and member of the University's Respiratory and Cardiac Rehabilitation and Management Research Group, fostering collaborations with organizations like Lung Foundation Australia and the Australian Physiotherapy Association to enhance care for chronic lung disease patients.