Eric Rasmussen

Activist, Atheist, Concerned citizen, Doctor, Educator/Teacher, Environmentalist, Explorer, Musician, Scientist, Technologist, World traveler

Twenty-five years on active duty with the US Navy. Submarines, aircraft carriers, cruisers, field hospitals, humanitarian operations centers, intensive care units, and Chairman of an academic Department of Medicine. Four wars, 18 deployments, several refugee camps, and lots of time at sea, including as Fleet Surgeon for the US Navy's Third Fleet. Stanford after submarines, for both undergrad and MD. Trauma training at San Francisco General. Internal Medicine residency at Parkland in Dallas. Hospitals in Oakland, San Diego, Seattle, Sarajevo, Lokichoggio, Lusaka, Basra, Baghdad, Kabul and a few others. DARPA Principle Investigator in Medicine and Computer Science. (Outstanding Investigator of the Year in 2003). Special Advisor in Humanitarian Informatics to the US Office of the Secretary of Defense. Director, Strong Angel International Disaster Response demonstrations (2000, 2004, 2006). More on those here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Angel Member of the Global Humanitarian Forum led by Kofi Annan, and of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at Kings College, London. Faculty in Disaster Medicine at the International Disaster Academy in Bonn, Germany and at the Chinese Institute for Disaster Management in Beijing. Core Faculty in Global Health at Singularity University located at NASA-Ames Research Center. Founding CEO of InSTEDD, a 2006 TED Prize awarded to Dr. Larry Brilliant when he was at Google.org. InSTEDD was created for "better outbreak detection, better disaster response" as a humanitarian NGO dedicated to information support and headquartered in Palo Alto. Now Chair of the InSTEDD Board of Directors and CEO of a social business, Infinitum Humanitarian Systems (IHS), chartered as a "profit for purpose" company specializing in the humanitarian sciences. IHS is headquartered in Seattle with staff in California, South Carolina, Mexico, and DC. All of our work is internationally focused and most is physically overseas.

Educating women. Providing clean drinking water to every human. Strengthening bonds between citizens and their governments. Educating women (did I mention that already?)

The technical barriers to effective collaboration are falling, even in the most remote villages of southern Laos and northern Afghanistan. Now it's a matter of will.

Critical Care Medicine, Disaster Management, Humanitarian Medicine, Information Technology, public health informatics

I'm one of the fantastically lucky humans charged with implementing a TED Wish. Larry Brilliant was awarded a TED Prize for "Better Early Detection, Better Early Response" to disease outbreaks and natural disasters and asked me to design and lead the effort. I started as CEO of InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases, and Disasters, and named to ensure TED was in the acronym) in October of 2007, and we publicly launched on 17 January 2008. We now have five distinct efforts globally, each designed to enhance collaboration and decision support in outbreak epidemiology and natural disaster response, including within the most recent Ebola outbreak. All our software is free and open source, and we work with humanitarian organizations on almost every continent, from the UN's World Health Organization in Geneva, to small rice cooperatives in Cambodia, to health clinics in Peru, HIV Clinics in Tanzania, and the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. I'm now Chair of the InSTEDD Board and very proud of their accomplishments. Larry was the right visionary and his ideas have grown beautifully. Ask me about it. Eric ( find me at RasmussenE@ihs-i.com or on cell at 360-621-3592 )

Trimming goat hooves (an under-appreciated skill...) and classical guitar. To be honest, I'm better with the goat hooves.