Iona is a Senior Teaching Fellow and Pathway Leader for the MA in Advertising Design Management at Southampton University. She is an expert in design management theory and practice and passionate about promoting the use and value of design as a tool for corporate competitive advantage.

Her PhD investigated the use of Visual Tools to enhance cross-collaborative decision-making in sustainable urban design projects. Her teaching and research interests are interwoven and revolve around the exploration, with Industry partners, of methods for embedding skills for employability that incorporate design, creativity and Innovation into teaching and learning practice.

In her academic career Iona has worked on a number of research projects investigating the applications and promoting the use of design including Vivacity 2020, and has published a number of conference papers and contributed to the book ‘Designing Sustainable Cities’.

Iona is currently working with a number of academics from a range of disciplines and business partners (including IBM) to explore the use of design in creating a tool to for data management and storage that will enhance the scientific data value chain. Prior to academia, Iona worked for 10 years in corporate broking working with large multi-nationals to place and manage risk.