Dr. Cherry's interest in wound healing was stimulated by supervising a leg ulcer clinic at the Touro Research Institute in New Orleans from 1965 until 1971; work which led to the publication of a number of fundamental papers on venous leg ulcers. Further postgraduate work, leading to a doctorate, was carried out at the Nuffield Department of Surgery, University of Oxford. His postgraduate studies continued at the Ischaemic Heart Disease Laboratory, University of Capetown where he was the Christiaan Barnard Research Fellow. from 1974 to 1975. He then continued clinical studies in the Department of Cardiology at the Radcliffe Infirmary, University of Oxford until 1978 when Dr. Cherry became Director of Plastic Surgery Research, Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, University of Michigan, U.S.A. as Assistant Professor of Surgery. He remained there until 1982 when he joined the Department of Dermatology, Oxford. He has been a member of the Plastic Surgery Research Council in America since 1979 and has given presentations yearly at their Annual Meeting.

Dr. Cherry has been in charge of the Wound Healing Programme in the Oxford Department of Dermatology since 1982 in conjunction with Professor Terence Ryan who has a major clinical interest in wound healing. The major emphasis of this Programme is evaluation of the treatment of patients with leg ulcers and other chronic wounds, both in hospital, and in the community. It concerns non-invasive vascular evaluation of these patients, documentation of wound size, and oedema changes in legs during treatment. In addition Dr Cherry has been responsible for the supervision of research nurses, technicians, visiting clinicians and students both from the University of Oxford and overseas.

He is a member of the Faculty of Clinical Medicine, Oxford University, England, and Honorary Professor to the Trauma Center Postgraduate Medical College and 304th. Hospital, Beijing, China. He has also co-ordinated a visiting research programme between China, Vietnam and Oxford in which researchers from Xi'an, Beijing, Wuhan and Hanoi have performed research. He has had a major exchange programme with the Xi'an Burn Unit in collaboration with Professor Chen Bi, head of the Burn Department and her deputy Professor Chiyu Jia. This cooperation has led to a number of published papers in international journals. Dr. Cherry has lectured in China and Vietnam on a number of occasions.

At the beginning of the Millennium he was an invited speaker at the International Conference on Life Sciences and Clinical Medicine 2000 organised by the Chinese Academy of Engineering where he spoke on wound healing cooperative research programmes between China and Europe.

As well as the clinical programme he supervises an equally important experimental wound healing programme, including cell culture work to provide cultured allograft keratinocytes for clinical wounds. An extensive programme on assessing traditional wound healing remedies using in vitro techniques is also part of the wound healing programme.

Dr. Cherry was a Board Member and the Past President of the European Tissue Repair Society (having completed his year of Presidency) of which the Fourth Annual Meeting was held in Oxford August 1994. He is editor of the ETRS Bulletin. He was also President of the European Wound Management Association and in this role he was Editor of the Proceedings of the 4th.Annual Meeting and chairman of the Programme Planning Committee of the 5th. Annual Meeting. He was co-organiser of the 1st. Joint Chinese Tissue Repair Society and European Tissue Repair Society Meeting which was held in X'ian, China September 22-27, 1996. He also organised the First Pan Asian/ETRS Wound Healing Meeting in Phuket, Thailand during October 1997. He has organised the Oxford European Wound Healing Summer School course since 1990. He is a also founder member and Secretary/Treasurer of the European Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel, and has organised major annual meetings for this panel in Oxford, England in the Septembers of 1997 and 1998.

Dr. Cherry was an invited speaker to the first Symposium on Venous Ulcers sponsored by the United Kingdom Department of Health and Social Security during November 1989 to describe the treatment of such patients in Dermatology. He was also an adviser to the EEC Wound Healing Dressing Committee in Brussels. He is author and co-author of over one hundred articles on angiogenesis and wound healing in scientific and medical journals as well as contributing to several books, including the first and second editions of the Oxford Textbook of Surgery, in which he was co-author of the introductory chapter on wound healing.