Clinical Professor Fiona Wood’s Story

• Clinical Professor Fiona Wood is renowned for her invention of spray on skin cells for burns patients

• She is also the mother of six children

• She and her family live in City Beach

Fiona aged 6

• I was born on 2nd February 1958• I was the third child in our family. I had two older

brothers and eventually got a younger sister• I grew up in Yorkshire where my parents still live• I went to the local school initially• My mother worked in a Quaker school and I was

able to go there as a staff child when I was 13. I was there for five years

• It was a pivotal time in my life because I was able to achieve more than I if I’d stayed in the Comprehensive School System that did not go past GCE level

• Numbers were my game from a very early stage. I was fascinated by maths and physics

• When I was 16 I was interested in doing maths and physics at uni but my brother and my mother thought medicine would be better.

• My mother said if you’re a doctor you will always have a job and be financially independent of the male!

• I heard that many times

•Fiona trained as a doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London•‘I always worked because we were means tested and on full grants. We had our fees and books paid and a living allowance but it was never quite enough so we always worked. It was starve or…work.’•She married Australian-born Tony Kierath and with their two children, migrated to Australia in 1987

• ‘I was overwhelmed by the sunniness …• Coming from the frozen north when it’s grey one

day and grey the next and dark the next day… Is there a sun???

• We’d arrived in the middle of the night and I remember waking my husband up the next morning at five o’clock and saying, “hey wake up, we’re going for a walk” and he said “why?” And I said “cos the sun’s shining!’ And he groaned and said, “it will be for the next 365 days!”

‘I am a wife, a mother, a surgeon and scientist…

• Fiona insists any success is down to team work• Fiona’s greatest challenge hasn’t been her

ground-breaking scientific research, but motherhood

• ‘Having your first child is the biggest life change. You can’t really prepare for that

• Going from five to six isn’t such a problem’

• Fiona Wood has two recurring characteristics:• She has genuine humility and a relentless

positive attitude• ‘I’ve got a lot of energy. My daily routine starts at

5a.m. and often I go to bed at midnight’• Through her enthusiasm, innovation and vision,

Fiona has saved and improved countless people’s lives

• She is an inspiration

Left to Right : Katrina, Fiona, Gillian and Beth 1993

Working with burns victims…

• Even relatively small burns can be extraordinarily devastating from a psychological as well as physical point of view

• Burns are devastating• It is a life-defining point• You lay in that bed hour after hour… in pain• We try very hard to give the best possible care

Fiona with a survivor of severe burns and his wife, 1993

Peter Hughes, survivor of the Bali bombing says,

• ‘When I woke up, I just couldn’t believe it. I thought “no human being should go through this” I screamed and cried…’

• Clinical Professor Wood says ‘we do positive things to reduce the time that burn patients have to suffer…

• We try and get the healing process working as soon as possible

• The sooner we can the less trauma and the better the recovery’

Spray-on skin cells

• ‘We’ve been working on spray-on skin cells since the early 90’s

• We take a little bit of skin from a normal area … skin that knows how to regenerate

• It knows how to repair without a scar• We take the sample of healthy cells and feed

them for five days in a tissue culture flask• Then we spray them onto the body and the

body is then the tissue culture flask

• ‘Every operation a person has is another bad day in the burns unit

• If we can reduce the number of operations… we reduce the pain and suffering that’s associated with it and also reduce the scarring

• Speed is very important for scarring’

• Previous techniques of skin culturing required 21 days

• Fiona and her team have reduced that period to five days

• Fiona has found that scarring is greatly reduced if replacement skin can be provided within 10 days

• Fiona’s holy grail is scarless healing

Fiona Wood, AMAustralian of the Year 2005

• ‘I am proud to be an Australian and will work towards a society dependent on the integrity of each other.’