Ronald Ross (May 13, 1857 - September, 16 1932) was a British doctor. He was born in India where his grandfather contracted malaria and he vowed at an early age to find a cure. At the age of eight, he was sent to England for his education. He began to study medicine in 1875, passed his final examination in 1880 and joined the Indian Medical Service in 1881. He began his research into malaria in 1892. In 1897 his discovery of the malarial parasite in the gastrointestinal tract of the Anopheles mosquito led to the realization that malaria was transmitted by Anopheles, and laid the foundation for combating the disease. In 1902, Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his remarkable work on malaria. His assistant, Kishori Mohan Bandyopadhyay, was awarded a gold medal. He made many contributions to the epidemiology of malaria, methods of survey and assessment, and the development of mathematical models for the study of its epidemiology. He also found time to be a poet, playwright, writer and painter. He died in 1932, after a long illness and asthma attack, at the age of 75.