Dr. Eric Rasmussen

Eric Rasmussen, M.D., MDM, FACP is the CEO for Infinitum Humanitarian Systems (IHS), a multinational consulting group built on a profit-for-purpose model. He is an internal medicine physician with both undergraduate and medical degrees from Stanford University and a European Master’s degree in disaster medicine from the UN World Health Organization’s affiliate CEMEC (Centre European pour la Medecin des Catastrophes) in Italy. He was elected a Fellow of the American College of Physicians in 1997 and a Fellow of the Explorer’s Club in 2014.
 
Eric is also a Research Professor in Environmental Security and Global Medicine at San Diego State University and an instructor in disaster medicine at both the International Disaster Academy in Bonn, Germany and the Institute for Disaster Preparedness at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
 
He serves, pro bono, as the medical director for two biotech startups, and as pro bono CEO to an NGO specializing in anti-slavery/anti-trafficking efforts for refugees. He’s a Permanent Advisor to the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Expert Panel on Water Disasters and has been a member of the US National Academy of Science’s Committee on Grand Challenges in Global Development since 2012.
 
He served in the US Navy for 25 years aboard nuclear submarines, amphibious ships, and aircraft carriers. His positions included Joint Task Force Surgeon (Forward) for the Hurricane Katrina response, Team Lead for the Banda Aceh Tsunami Response Team from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Fleet Surgeon for the US Navy’s Third Fleet, director of an Intensive Care Unit, and Chairman of an academic department of medicine in Seattle.
 
His wartime deployments included Bosnia three times, Afghanistan twice, and Iraq for nine months. For a portion of his Navy career he was also a Principal Investigator in humanitarian informatics for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
 
After retiring from the Navy he was appointed the Founding CEO for the TED Prize awarded to Dr. Larry Brilliant, then Executive Director of Google.org.
 
Since 2014, Eric has also led the Global Disaster Response Team for the Roddenberry Foundation, supported by the Star Trek franchise and in partnership with MIT. That team provides permanent water purification and renewable power to displaced populations and has deployed to Supertyphoon Haiyan in the Philippines, the Nepal earthquake, Hurricane Mathew in Haiti, and three times to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
 
Watch Out of the Shadows: A Universal Identification System | Eric Rasmussen | TEDxSanJuanIsland, Ebola: responding, creating, and striving | Eric Rasmussen | TEDxBerkeley, Hurricane Matthew Haiti Deployment, Eric Rasmussen issues on the Earth, High-tech Support for Emergency Responders, and Agile Technology with Lives at Stake: InSTEDD in Haiti & Beyond. Read his LinkedIn profile, his TED profile, and his Wikipedia profile. Follow his Twitter feed.