Founded in 1999, the Wound Healing Foundation is a public 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to improving wound healing worldwide through funding research, education, and outreach. The Foundation was formed by dedicated professionals committed to wound care and to provide patients, researchers, and health professionals the resources to make significant contributions in the critical and under appreciated area of wound healing.
The Wound Healing Foundation is governed by a dedicated Board of Directors composed of leaders in academia, private practice and industry devoted to wound healing problems and the patients and their caregivers that are affected by them.
The Foundation funded the creation of wound healing guidelines for acute wounds, chronic wounds and prevention of wounds by best practices and evidence. These guidelines are freely available to everyone. The Foundation presents yearly research fellowship awards to outstanding scientists and is positioned to expand its research program through additional small grants and young investigator awards.
WHF Keynote Address – T.K. Hunt Lecture
Svetlana Mojsov, PhD
Lulu Chow Wang and Robin Chemers Neustein
Research Associate Professor
The Rockefeller University
Talk: GLP-1: From a Putative Peptide to Effective Medicines for Diabetes and Obesity
Svetlana Mojsov was born in Skopje, North Macedonia (former Yugoslavia). She graduated from the University of Belgrade in 1971 with a degree in physical chemistry and in 1972 was accepted in the graduate program at Rockefeller University in the laboratory of Professor Bruce Merrifield. Mojsov obtained PhD in 1978 and remained in Merrifield group as Postdoctoral Associate and later as Research Associate.
In 1983 Mojsov was appointed a member of the Endocrine unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and inaugural director of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute peptide core facility at MGH. Her research between 1983 and 1990 at the Endocrine Unit established that GLP-1 is an incretin and has therapeutic potential for treatment of Type 2 diabetes.
In 1990 Mojsov returned to Rockefeller University as Assistant Professor and was promoted to Research Associate Professor in 2002.
Mojsov is a co-inventor on series of patents licensed by the Massachusetts General Hospital to Novo Nordisk Pharmaceutical company that developed GLP-1 analogs, liraglutide and later semaglutide, for Type 2 diabetes and obesity.
Mojsov’s work on GLP-1 has received national and international recognition including the following awards and prizes: 2023-Vinfuture Prize for Innovation; 2023-Nature’s 10 Influential Scientists; 2024-Pearl Meister Greengard Award; 2024-Lasker-DeBakey Medical Clinical Award; 2024-Tang Prize; 2024-Princess of Asturias Prize; 2025-Warren Tri-annual Prize; 2025-BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award; 2025-Breakthrough Prize; 2025-Election to the National Academy of Sciences USA; 2025-Distinguished Medical Science Award; 2025-Spector Prize from Columbia University, 2025-Helen Dean King Award from Wistar Institute, 2026 Kimberly Prize from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
H. Paul Ehrlich Rising Star Lecture at DLS 2025
Mateusz S. Wietecha, DMD, PhD
Assistant Professor, Oral Biology College of Dentistry
University of Illinois Chicago
Chicago, IL
Talk: Spatio-temporal Cellular Dynamics Regulating Differential Healing Outcomes
Dr. Wietecha completed the DMD/PhD dual-degree program at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) College of Dentistry in 2015, and his doctoral research in the lab of Dr. Luisa DiPietro was funded by the Dental Scientist Fellowship through the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR). From 2015-2022, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher and senior research scientist in the lab of Prof. Dr. Sabine Werner at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zurich), where his research was performed in the context of the SKINTEGRITY.CH [skintegrity.ch] national consortium. The Wietecha Lab was started in 2022 at the UIC College of Dentistry Department of Oral Biology, and since 2024, it has been funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA). Dr. Wietecha received funding from the Wound Healing Society (WHS) Research Grant Award, and he was recently recognized with an Early-Career Faculty Award from the WHS and the H. Paul Ehrlich Rising Star in Wound Healing Research Award from the Wound Healing Foundation. The Wietecha Lab uses emerging multi-omic tools such as single-cell and spatial transcriptomics in conjunction with state-of-the-art systems biology and bioinformatics approaches to investigate the spatio-temporal cellular and molecular dynamics of differential healing outcomes in wounds of skin and oral mucosa in health and disease.
Solventum, formerly 3M Health Care, Fellowship Lecture at DLS 2025
Nashwa Cheema, PhD
Massachusetts General Hospital
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Harvard Medical School
Boston, MD
Talk: Photobiomodulation for Therapeutic Treatment of Post-burn Muscle Wasting in a Mouse Model
Nashwa Cheema, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, in Dr. Rox Anderson’s group at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine. Her research focuses on mitochondrial and muscle biology, broadly interested in aging and disease. She attained her phD from University of Alberta, Canada in Physiology, Cell and Developmental Biology where her thesis was focused on sarcopenia, loss of muscle mass and function with age. Prior to joining HMS/MGH, Nashwa was a postdoc in Dr. David Hood’s laboratory at York University, Canada, a pioneer in the field of exercise physiology. Her project in his lab was focused on treatment strategies for mitochondrial health in isolated fibroblasts from patients with mitochondrial mutations. Her current research is on using near-infrared light (photobiomodulation) therapy to improve muscle function in mice, mitigate injuries from exercise and muscle wasting in a mouse model of large burn injury. She has used both in vitro and in vivo models to understand the biological effects of light. Her work suggests that near-infrared light can activate regenerative genes that protect tissue from cellular stress.
Come join the only collaborative wound meeting organized by two non-profit organizations!