Dr. LaBrot attended the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland and worked as a hospital doctor in the Irish Health Care System, eventually helping to set up and operate a long-term care elderly facility that also provided acute hospital services, the first of its kind in Ireland. Travel and private medical mission work in developing countries led him to combine his love of the sea and medicine to bring more help to remote rural communities, founding the Floating Doctors in 2009. In 2010, Dr. LaBrot led the first Floating Doctors mission to Haiti and has been continuing ever since. Dr. LaBrot is also the President of RemoteCare Education, providing training for clinicians planning to practice international medical relief, and a professor of Global Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California as well as at UC Irvine Medical School.

Dr. LaBrot, says that each successive time he traveled in the developing world, his backpack carried fewer personal items and more medical supplies, and that the most heartbreaking part of doing medicine in the developing world is when the backpack is empty and there are still many people in desperate need. For him, Floating Doctors and his crew of dedicated volunteers is “A much bigger backpack over many thousands of miles; I promised myself I would come back to the developing world with more help, and now I finally have the chance to keep my promise.”