Tom Catena

Tom Catena was born in 1964 in Amsterdam, New York, one of seven children in a Catholic family, and played nose guard on the football team at Brown University while studying mechanical engineering. He switched to medicine at Duke, served as a flight surgeon in the US Navy to pay off his loans, and then spent several years as a mission doctor in Kenya.

In 2008 he went to the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, an isolated region of the south, to help open Mother of Mercy Hospital at Gidel. It was the only hospital of any size for a population of several hundred thousand people, and he was its only surgeon. When fighting between the Sudanese government and rebels resumed in 2011, the mountains were sealed off and the government's aircraft began bombing villages, markets and the hospital itself. Foreign staff were pulled out. Catena stayed.

For years he worked without a second doctor, treating gunshot wounds, burns from bomb blasts, malaria, tuberculosis, obstructed labour and children with leprosy, often more than three hundred patients a day, with supplies smuggled in on lorries. He has said he saw no point in a hospital whose doctor left when it was needed most. The people of the Nuba, mostly Muslim, call him Dr Tom, and he married a local nurse, Nasima.

He received the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity in 2017 and gave the money to the hospital. He is still there.