What type of scientist is fiona wood

She worked as a senior house officer and registrar in various surgery disciplines in hospitals in London and Sheffield and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons London and Edinburgh in In Wood moved to Perth.

Wood became a consultant plastic surgeon in and her interests focused on burns care and reconstruction. Also in she became the director of the Burn Service of Western Australia. In , after treating a patient with burns to 90 per cent of his body using an emerging US-invented technology of cultured skin, Wood was inspired to research how to help heal burns more quickly as a means to reduce scarring.

Wood and Stoner co-founded the McComb Foundation in to research and develop innovative tissue engineering technologies. Ground-breaking technology developed by Wood and Stoner was used to treat the devastating burns suffered by people in the Bali bombings of She is also involved in a number of educational and disaster response programs.

The research tradition is not strong in surgery. My colleague, Suzanne Rea — who is going to be submitting her PhD on the bone marrow work that she has done — has been a consultant with me now for four years. The gold standard has to be the skin of that area of that person at that time of their life. Anything less means we will jump the hurdle with relative ease. Piecing it together, yes.

I have been really fortunate in some of the surgeons I have met along the way. And I went close to the edge. Yet, am I strong enough to cope with that? And I guess it did strengthen me. It strengthened my resolve that there will be answers and we will get better. That was a young boy. I have had pictures of him, of his face particularly, over my desk for about four years, trying to work out how to fix it.

But it was, oh, tough times in children, in different ways. Death is much more frequent in adults because the injuries are bigger. The pressures in kids are very different, because of the family and the fact that then they grow! A value system of determination and respect. They choose to ignore it when it suits them. I was born in a Yorkshire mining village. I had two older brothers so I was a sort of kid sister, but I did have a younger sister.

They were very focused on education and sport, my parents. Dad was a miner. Mum worked in the youth system until I was about Then she saw a job advertised for a house mother in a Quaker boarding school. She used to work nights and to pick brussel sprouts and so on in the daytime. So she went off to have an interview at the school, and she came back as the phys ed teacher — which was most impressive. She went on and did great things. She was coordinator of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards for north England and things like that.

She saw that what she wanted basically was for my sister and me to go to school, to the Quaker school. By then the education system had changed. My eldest brother had left school at 15, having been in the secondary modern system.

We girls were caught in the next stage. Then I was in this Quaker school where they were all pacifists and wore long cloaks like Harry Potter. Well, I certainly have a great deal of respect for my fellow human. As I said, I can run fast. So he had a sort of sniff of the fresh air. He was absolutely adamant about that.

I went there because my brother went there. My interview was interesting. Oddly enough, later on he followed me here. It was great when he and his family came to Australia. I came here with a couple of years still to go. I had got my general surgical fellowship and I was part way through my plastic surgical fellowship, so we landed here with about two years to go.

But I ended up sidestepping — being sideswiped is probably a more accurate description — into general surgery for a year, before going back into plastic surgery. I then passed the plastics exam. I had two when I arrived here.

We want lots of these. Then I had a child shortly before I leaving the UK. My second child was just five weeks old when I moved to Australia. Then my third was born after the first six months of my plastics training in Australia.

And I had three children as a consultant. Someone asked me what I did and how I managed when they were young. There are never any boundaries to research. You might have postdocs and so on, but the lab keeps going 24 hours a day.

At least in surgery you get days off. Can you give me a brief sense of how you organise your life? Well, it must be okay if they accept the plastic surgeon to look after their broken bones. When the kids were younger I used to work a lot at night while they were asleep. Then as they have got older they want their bit of time as well. So getting up early helps. And I like to stay fit. Anybody with two or maybe three kids would know about the logarithmic increase in driving and everything else.

Do you still do all the driving? Not all of it. For example, a number of them will be swimming in the morning or riding their bikes or whatever. I think so. You should take it easy. Slow down. Hang on! Is this pot calling kettle black? I was never as bad as you. The challenges of commercialisation.

It really was an exercise in communication, collaboration and mutual respect. I met people along the way that were difficult to respect and caused problems. So I had to move on. That was painful and difficult. It was difficult, having to realise that not everybody coming to you saying that they would do things actually had the capacity or the intent to do those things. So it was an interesting journey. Yes, taking a piece of your skin, processing it and putting it back on you.

It was changing the dynamics of the healing process and really speeding it up, because speed was the big issue that we identified as the first cab off the rank to be dealt with in reducing scars. Yes, because we were taking skin from an area that is programmed for regeneration. We are regenerating all the time, so we harvest the regenerating capacity and introduce it into the area where that capacity has been overwhelmed. It was a fascinating journey, apart from the difficulties, and the learning curve was extraordinary.

You have to make sure that you are rigorous about the frameworks. Another interesting thing about the whole business was dealing with the media and the perceptions of things. For us it was part of the process we were going through. Yes, with things going backwards and forwards. My energy, really, is focused on the patient care, the research that will back up better quality patient care.

The vast majority of people, though, are extraordinarily positive and supportive. I have talked to people like Charlie Teo, the neurosurgeon in Sydney who takes on difficult cases and is largely hated by his colleagues. One wonders whether or not some of the opposition arises from self-reflection that you could have tried harder, whether people get threatened, in a sense, by somebody else who is trying harder.

I feel very strongly that everybody makes their personal choice. I believe that every morning nobody is trying to do things badly; we are all trying to do our best.

My choice is to work on the extreme rebuild end of the spectrum as opposed to any other place in the spectrum. Fiona Wood was born in a Yorkshire mining village in , the third child and first daughter in a family of four. Her father was a miner and her mother a youth worker and teacher.

Wood studied medicine at St Thomas' Hospital in London, graduating in , after which she undertook general surgery training. In she migrated to Perth, Western Australia, with her Australian husband Tony Kierath, a surgeon, and their two young children. She completed her training in plastic surgery in Perth and went on to become head of the burns unit at the Royal Perth Hospital, while also working as a consultant plastic surgeon at the Royal Perth and Princess Margaret hospitals.

During this period, she and Kierath had four more children. In , Wood began collaborating with medical scientist Marie Stoner to work on tissue engineering as a means to more effective ways of treating burns.