Collaboration for Disaster Resilience: InSTEDD in the Mekong Delta

Dr. Eric Rasmussen was elected in October 2007 as Chief Executive Officer of InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters), an international nonprofit organization founded by Google.org and dedicated to delivering innovative technological support to those who help the world stay safe.

Prior to accepting this position Dr. Rasmussen was both Chairman of the Department of Medicine within Naval Hospital Bremerton near Seattle, Washington, and an advisor in humanitarian informatics for the US Office of the Secretary of Defense. He holds academic positions at several institutions and has been a Principal Investigator for both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and for the National Science Foundation. He is a Reviewer for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the American Journal of Public Health and sits on several advisory boards, including the Crisis Management Resources Board for the National Academy of Sciences. He has a number of publications and has been awarded several personal, unit, and theater military decorations, including a Presidential Legion of Merit.

Dr. Rasmussen spent seven years enlisted in nuclear submarines before leaving the Navy to receive his undergraduate and medical degrees from Stanford University. After graduate work in molecular biology at Los Alamos National Laboratory and teaching in Haiti, he completed a Residency in Internal Medicine and re-entered the Navy as Chief Resident in Medicine at the Navy Medical Center in Oakland, California. Subsequent Navy positions included three years as Fleet Surgeon for the US Navy’s Third Fleet.

Dr. Rasmussen, with an additional European Master’s Degree in Disaster Medicine, served on the Afghanistan humanitarian support planning staff within US Central Command Headquarters (CENTCOM) in 2002, and later as a physician to the Iraq Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) for the Iraq War in 2002-2003. As a member of the DART, he served within the International Humanitarian Operations Center in Kuwait and was later selected for the DARPA 2003 “Sustained Excellence in a Principal Investigator” award.

Further work as Director of the Strong Angel series of international humanitarian support demonstrations led to work in Afghanistan in 2004 and 2007, and in Indonesia as head of a Civil-Military Coordination Team for the tsunami response in Banda Aceh in early 2005. Later in 2005, he deployed with Joint Task Force Katrina in New Orleans, coordinating a small portion of the relief response after Hurricane Katrina.

In addition to his responsibilities at InSTEDD, he currently serves as Permanent Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Forum on Water Disasters, and as a member of Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum.

Eric has been married for more than 20 years to Demi, and has daughters Melissa and Faith. He divides his time between Palo Alto and a small ranch near Olympic National Park in western Washington.

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Eduardo Jezierski has spent his whole career designing, implementing, and deploying software solutions on a global scale. He originally received an MsC in Informatics after initial work in nuclear engineering, and later worked in Argentina in the areas of GIS analysis, machine learning, and modeling for anthropology challenges. His Master’s thesis was on robotics control, genetic algorithms and neural networks. He spent nine years in software development at Microsoft, first supporting largest enterprise customers, then later as Program Manager and Solutions Architect.

He was one of the founders of a team dedicated to building software assets (tools, practices, frameworks, services, content and information architectures) to improve quality and productivity of Microsoft’s business customers. The usage of these assets and frameworks climbed at its inception from zero to more than a million developers worldwide and adoption in excess of 80% of the target market – including financial, healthcare, military, and manufacturing customers.

Mr. Jezierski also developed a strategy for building communities consisting of academia, software vendors, other technical partners, customers and grassroots participants by initiating new SharedSource approach for engineering at Microsoft. There are now more than 25,000 registered members and hundreds of thousands of lines of source code shared between the participants, while still maintaining acceptable IP protection for Microsoft and other members. A practitioner of agile software-design approaches, he has built and led numerous global teams in producing mission-critical assets in just months, and has presented on software architectures and design approaches for large distributed systems in conferences around the globe. Most recent development arenas include transactional and analytics systems, software systems integration, scalable web services, and user interface design.

He helped found a team at Microsoft dedicated to starting new businesses by providing an internal venture capital model and growing innovation practices and entrepreneurship in the company, working directly with the staff of the Chief Software Architect. He contributed to defining strategy and early execution of the new group and delivered prototypes in the domain of mesh architectures, real-time communications and immersive web environments for long-tail retail. Several of these prototypes were designed, written, and validated in the field in collaboration with Microsoft’s Humanitarian Systems Group.

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