Eyes on the road

Professor Joanne Wood, originally from the UK, moved to Australia in the late ’80s for a role at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). In the years that followed, Prof Wood established herself as a leading global authority on vision and driving, authoring around 300 research papers and picking up a long list of awards along the way. Here we discuss how she chose this area of research and her most significant findings to date.

JW: I completed my undergraduate studies in Optometry at Aston University in Birmingham, followed by two years in private practice including my pre-registration year. I then returned to Aston to complete a PhD, which included a series of studies on static automated perimetry in normal and abnormal eyes, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship in clinical psychophysics at Oxford University.