Raul Ruiz is an emergency room physician whose interests in medicine and the lives of veterans, the middle class, and people from disadvantaged communities tend to intersect. He approaches several issues—climate change, the dust blowing around California’s parched Salton Sea, and gun violence across America—as public health matters. He finished his undergraduate degree at UCLA before going on to Harvard, where he earned a medical degree, a master’s in public policy, and a master’s in public health—the first Latino to earn three graduate degrees from the university.

Learn what Raul Ruiz says about finding common ground