Richard Starr Ross (January 18, 1924 – August 11, 2015) was an American cardiologist and served as Dean of Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine from 1975 to 1990.
[2] He graduated cum laude in 1947, then moved to Baltimore, where he planned to spend a year on the Osler Medical Service at Hopkins as an intern and then return to Boston.
After completing one year of his residency at Hopkins, Ross joined the Army Medical Corps and served as a captain and chief of cardiovascular medicine with the 141st General Hospital in the Far East during the Korean War.
Ross became associated with Helen Taussig, a renowned pediatric cardiologist, who along with the surgeon Alfred Blalock and laboratory technician Vivien Thomas perfected the "blue baby" operation that established the field of cardiac surgery.
He urged physicians to counsel their patients in the three risk factors associated with heart disease: hypertension, cigarette smoking, and high cholesterol levels.