Ralph Henderson Kellogg was a professor of physiology at UCSF for many years. He was born in New London, Connecticut on June 7, 1920, graduated from medical school at the University of Rochester in 1943, and served as a medical officer in the US Navy for the duration of World War II. In 1946 Kellogg briefly acted as an Investigator in Physiology at Bethesda's Naval Medical Research Institute, then taught first year medical students at Harvard Medical School, while acquiring his Ph.D. in Physiology from Harvard in 1953.

In 1953 he was appointed to the faculty of the University of California School of Medicine, where he taught physiology for over 35 years. In addition to teaching, Dr Kellogg carried on extensive research. In the early years most of his work was centered on investigations in renal physiology. In 1955 he was invited to spend the summer at the White Mountain Research Station, near the summit of the arid 14,246 ft White Mountain, on the edge of the Owens Valley, in eastern California. His initial investigation that summer set the direction for his life-long interest in and work on high altitude physiology. Experiments performed by Kellogg and his associates at White Mountain from the mid-1950s and to the mid-1960s provided an extensive array of knowledge to climbers, scientists and others concerned with human response to high altitude conditions. Other investigations performed by Dr. Kellogg, or under his direction, focused on various aspects of the physiology of respiration.