Ross I. Donaldson, MD, MPH is a UCLA medical professor specializing in emergency medicine and global health. He is the critically-acclaimed author of The Lassa Ward: One Man's Fight Against One of the World's Deadliest Diseases, about caring for refugees during an outbreak of an Ebola-like illness in Sierra Leone. 

Dr. Donaldson specializes in the provision of medical care in crisis areas and has worked in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. His extensive travels have taken him via tugboats and tuk-tuks—through distant revolutions, landmined fields, and warring countries. He has been a humanitarian in some of the world’s most dangerous places, a NASA expedition doctor to one of the planet’s highest lakes, and the caregiver to some of humanity’s poorest people.

The recipient of numerous academic honors, and Chief Editor of the forthcoming Tarascon Medical Translation Handbook that helps physicians communicate with their foreign speaking patients in 18 different languages, Dr. Donaldson is an internationally invited speaker and appears on television and cable. 

His current humanitarian efforts are focused in Iraq, where he is helping to build an emergency medical system for the country’s traumatized civilians. He is a founding member of the Iraq Emergency Medicine Working Group and principal author of Iraq’s 5-year strategic plan for emergency care.