Wood, Fiona (1958-…), is a British-born Australian doctor. She is known for inventing new treatments for patients with severe burns.
Fiona Melanie Wood was born in Yorkshire, England, on Feb. 1, 1958. She studied medicine at St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London, graduating in 1981. In 1985, she married Tony Kierath, an Australian surgeon. In 1987, they moved to Perth, Australia, where she completed her training in plastic surgery.
During her training, Wood often treated burn patients using a surgical technique called skin grafting. The operation involves taking healthy skin from one part of a patient’s body to cover a wound on another part of the body. Traditionally, skin grafts are applied as sheets of tissue which become integrated into the wound as blood vessels grow in from the wound.
In 1993, Wood began working with Marie Stoner, an Australian medical scientist. Together, they worked on growing skin cells in the laboratory, initially as sheets of skin cells. They were able to shorten the process from 21 to 10 days. They rapidly developed a method for spraying a solution of cultured skin cells directly onto burn wounds. The skin cell solution could be cultured in as few as 5 days. This enabled the healing process to begin much sooner than in conventional skin grafting. The next step was to reduce all of the steps into a single process, known as the ReCell kit. Now healthy skin cells can be harvested and sprayed onto a burn wound within 30 minutes. The method also greatly reduced the scarring associated with skin grafts.
In 1999, Stoner and Wood started the McComb Research Foundation to fund research on improving treatment for burn patients. It was renamed the Fiona Wood Foundation in 2012.
Wood is a professor at the Burn Injury Research Unit of the University of Western Australia and director of the Burn Service of Western Australia. She has received many honors for her work. She was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2003. The Order of Australia is Australia’s highest award for service to the country or to humanity. In 2005, Wood was named Australian of the Year. In 2024, she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia, a higher level of the order.
