Lesley Harbon is an Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Design and Society. She comes to this position after a varied teaching and research career, teaching Indonesian and German at primary, secondary and tertiary level, and more recently teaching in language teacher preparation programs. 
Lesley has been involved in languages education in Australian schools and universities since the early 1970s. Lesley learned Indonesian during her high school years, then studied German alongside Indonesian at the University of Sydney in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She taught Indonesian and German at Tennant Creek High School in the early 1980s then taught Indonesian at the University of Southern Queenland in the mid-1980s. During the 1990s she was sessional Lecturer in Indonesian at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, concurrently teaching primary level Indonesian at Parkes Public School. Lesley then moved to be Lecturer in Languages Other Than English (LOTE) Education at the University of Tasmania in the mid 1990s, later completing her PhD in 2001. After Lesley's move to the University of Sydney in 2002 she continued her teaching and research in language teacher education, became further involved in internationalisation of higher education, first as the Director of Study Abroad, Exchange and Short Term Study Abroad in the Faculty of Education and Social Work from 2006, then as Associate Dean International from 2009 to 2014. At UTS Lesley has served as Head of School in the UTS School of International Studies between 2015 and 2018, and between 2018 and 2021, Lesley headed the merged UTS School of International Studies and Education. 
In 2009 and 2010 Lesley was President of the Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers' Associations (AFMLTA), the national peak body for language teachers in Australia. 
She has sole-authored and joint-authored/edited numerous book publications, book chapters and refereed journal articles since 1990. Lesley has delivered keynote presentations and sole-authored and joint-authored conference papers at language teachers' conferences (including applied linguistics and TESOL) in Australia and overseas. She has reviewed papers for a number of national and international languages education journals.
Lesley has supervised numerous doctoral, masters and honours projects to completion. She has consulted on languages education to schooling systems and government agencies, and has designed and taught many language teacher professional development workshops and programs.
Over her career, Lesley has participated in beginner language classes in Tetum, Amharic, Dutch and Japanese.