LEO J. DE SOUZA was an orthopaedic surgeon at Hennepin County Medical Center, Minneapolis, and Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota.

Born in Tanganyika and educated in India, he trained in surgery in Britain and was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh. Returning to East Africa, Leo accepted a position as specialist surgeon in northern Uganda, eventually transferring to Kampala where he taught at Makerere University, helped run the Polio Clinic and was promoted to senior orthopaedic consultant at Mulago Hospital.

Leo and his family fled to Minnesota, following the 1971 coup by Idi Amin. His recertification in orthopaedics took him to Toronto, where he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Canada. Back in Minnesota, he was admitted to the American Academy of Surgeons.

On his retirement, Hennepin County Medical Center and the University of Minnesota Department of Surgery presented  him with the Lifetime Achievement Award for his commitment to resident education.

He decided, in his seventies,  to pursue a Master's Degree in Creative Writing at Hamline University where No Place For Me: A Memoir of an Indian Doctor in East Africa received the award for Best Nonfiction Thesis of the Year in 2002.

Leo died in March 2016 just shy of his ninetieth birthday.