Even before the first patient in the United States was diagnosed with the virus, teams of health care professionals and researchers were working with officials from West African countries hit hardest by the Ebola outbreak. Thomas Ksiazek, director of high containment laboratory operations at the Galveston National Laboratory at UTMB, discusses his life’s work with special pathogens, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention request that took him to Sierra Leone during the largest Ebola epidemic in history.