Iona Millwood completed an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge and a DPhil in Molecular Genetics at the University of Oxford. She worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Imperial College London, on large-scale genetic epidemiological projects including the Northern Finland Birth Cohorts, and also spent several years as a Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Australia, developing and conducting clinical trials for biomedical methods of HIV prevention in Australia and South-East Asia.