Professor Dr. John Greenwood AM, BSc(Hons), MBChB, MD, DHlthSc, FRCS(Eng), FRCS(Plast), FRACS
John Greenwood was born just outside Manchester, UK in 1963 and grew up in Middleton and Heywood. He entered the University of Manchester in 1983 to fulfil his childhood dream to study medicine. Qualifying in 1989 with Bachelor Degrees in Medicine and Surgery (added to a intercalated Bachelor of Science Degree in Anatomy from 1986) his meticulousness guided his specialist training into Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, where he developed his love of burn surgery. He was awarded a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1998, and passed both the General Surgery and Plastic Surgery Fellowships of the Royal Colleges of England, Scotland and Ireland. Reaching the end of his training, he was head-hunted to run the troubled Adult Burns Service at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in South Australia in 2001. He achieved the fellowship of the Australasian College of Surgeons in 2002 and a few months later was dispatched (with the Burns Assessment Team he had created) to Darwin in the aftermath of the Bali Bombings, where he treated 67 returning burn victims. He received Membership of the Order of Australia (equivalent to the UK’s MBE) for his actions in 2003. He built the burns service into one of the world’s best, and having one of the lowest mortality rates of any burn centre globally over the next two decades, adding a higher degree (Doctor of Health Sciences) to his suffixes in 2013. His unit remains the only unit outside the United States to be granted the coveted Verification by the American Burn Association and American College of Surgeons. Disgruntled with materials available to allow the survival and subsequent treatment of burn injuries exceeding 80% of the total body surface area, he developed two products based in a biodegradable polyurethane and used them in hundreds of cases. His Biodegradable Temporising Matrix (BTM) is now in widespread use globally. His two products combined allowed the survival of an adult patient with full thickness burns to 95% of his body. He was awarded South Australian of the Year in 2016 and retired completely from medicine in 2020. He has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters.
Since retirement, he has produced two progressive rock albums (one of which is his debut solo album, Dark Blue) , played on a further three albums as a guest, and completed a world tour with Unitopia in 2023 showcasing Seven Chambers (of which he is credited with much of the composition). His second solo album, and a live album from Unitopia’s tour, are close to completion.