The burns surgeon who is single-handedly responsible for patients from an area covering one third of the Australian mainland had never heard of Ash Wednesday when he took up his job. 
Dr John Greenwood was headhunted from Manchester to attend to patients across notoriously bushfire-prone areas, including South Australia, the Northern Territory, western NSW and western Victoria. He arrived at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in   December 2001 and his colleagues were muttering about the prospect of another summer like the one that fanned the deadly Ash Wednesday fires of 1983. "I said, 'What do you mean by Ash Wednesday?" said Greenwood, who is South Australia's Australian of the Year for 2016.
Alarmed by the probability of a major fire breaking out within his 2.4-million-square-kilometre catchment, Greenwood quickly set up a mobile burns unit that could rapidly respond to a crisis.
Just 10 months later, the Bali bombings became its first major test when Greenwood flew to Darwin to attend to dozens of patients arriving from Denpasar with life-threatening burns.
Along with a registrar and nurse, he attended to 45 patients during a marathon 36-hour shift. "Bali was enormously formative because mass burns disaster incidents in the first world are relatively uncommon," he said.
"So it gave me an insight into how these things had to be managed in order to get the best outcome for every patient."
The unit remains the only mobile burns assessment team in Australia. Greenwood next trained his sights on improving burns care.
About 50 people die every year in Australia from burns injuries; in India, 500,000.
He spent the next decade developing an artificial skin that would protect people's wounds from infection and provide a scaffolding for a new skin to grow over, and was cheap enough to be made available in third world countries.
It has been tested in 32 patients with excellent results.
At the same time, he has been developing a bioreactor that is able to multiply by 180 times the amount of skin that can be grown from a skin graft.
"I devised methods of using two different products in a staged way so we didn't ever have to use skin grafts again." he said.