Gino Strada, aged 56, is married and has a daughter.
He graduated in Milan and specialized in surgery. During the 80s he was mainly involved with surgery for heart and heart-lung transplants, spending long periods in the United States, at Stanford and Pittsburgh Universities, and working at Harefield Hospital (UK) and Groote Schuur Hospital in Capetown, South Africa.
In 1988 he decided to apply his surgical experience to helping and treating war victims. From 1989 to 1994 he worked with the Geneva-based International Red Cross in war zones: 1989 Quetta, Pakistan; 1990 Dese, Ethiopia and Khao-IDang, Thailand; 1991 Kabul, Afghanistan and Ayacucho, Peru; 1992 Kabul, Afghanistan; 1993 Balbala, Djibouti and Berbera, Somalia; 1994 Bosnia.
The experience accumulated from years of war surgery convinced Gino Strada of the need for a small, agile, highly specialized organization capable of intervening on behalf of civilian war victims and not hampered by the bureaucratic sluggishness of large organizations.
With very scanty resources, Gino Strada and a group of friends and colleagues founded Emergency in 1994.
