Eric Rasmussen

Dr. Rasmussen is a medical doctor and the CEO for Infinitum Humanitarian Systems (IHS), a multinational consulting group built on a profit-for-purpose model. By training 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.

He served in the US Navy for 25 years aboard nuclear submarines, amphibious ships, and aircraft carriers. His positions included 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 (x3), Afghanistan (x2), and Iraq for ten months.
He also spent nine years as a Principal Investigator in humanitarian informatics for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where his focus was civil-military collaboration in conflict zones. In 2003 he received DARPA’s capstone award as Outstanding Investigator of the Year. Soon after he retired from the Navy to serve as the CEO of InSTEDD, a humanitarian NGO established as a TED Prize by Dr. Larry Brilliant, then Executive Director of Google.org. InSTEDD’s charter is to put into action the goals outlined by Dr. Brilliant’s 2006 TED Prize speech for better global disease outbreak surveillance and response. Dr. Rasmussen shifted from CEO to Chair of the InSTEDD Board of Directors in 2010 and became CEO of IHS soon after.

Since 2014 he has also led the Global Disaster Response Team for the Roddenberry Foundation, supported by the Star Trek franchise.