Samer Attar

Samer Attar grew up in the United States and trained as an orthopaedic surgeon, eventually joining the faculty at Northwestern University in Chicago. As a medical student he had gone to help at Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks, an early sign of a pull toward emergency medicine that later drew him toward the war in Syria, his family's country of origin.

From 2013 he began taking unpaid leave to volunteer in field hospitals in Aleppo and northern Syria with Doctors Without Borders and the Syrian American Medical Society, operating on victims of airstrikes and shelling in facilities that were themselves targeted, sometimes deliberately, over the course of the siege. He returned repeatedly over several years, treating patients with makeshift equipment and dwindling anaesthetic supplies, and was one of the last American doctors working in eastern Aleppo before the opposition-held part of the city fell at the end of 2016.

He later volunteered in other conflict and disaster zones, including Iraq, Liberia during the Ebola outbreak, and after the Nepal earthquake. In 2019 the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons gave him its highest honour for humanitarian service, recognition for a career spent choosing to work where hospitals were being emptied rather than filled.