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Dr. Kirsch has extensive disaster, international health and health care management experience. He is the co-Director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response (CRDR) in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an Associate Professor and the Director of Operations for the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Deputy Director of the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR).

For the past 15 years he has served as the National Physician Advisor for the American Red Cross Disaster Health Services, and has consulted on disaster-related issues for the World Health Organization, Unicef, the Centers for Disease Control and the United States Agency for International Development (Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance). He also has real-life disaster management experience from local incidents to the responses to the 9-11 terrorist attacks and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Dr. Kirsch is an experienced educator and has lectured nationally and internationally on a variety of health issues. He teaches the course, “Public Health Issues in Disasters” at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and is the Director of the Johns Hopkins Wilderness Medicine Course. He is an author of 24 scientific articles, dozens of abstract and four textbook chapters. He is also the second editor of an international health textbook (Emergent Field Medicine) and an editor and reviewer for the leading emergency medicine journal, the Annals of Emergency Medicine. He served as the editor of the international section of the Annals of Emergency Medicine from 1995-2000.