Tom Kirsch
Tom Kirsch is the director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an associate professor 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. He is a board-certified emergency physician and expert in disaster planning and response, wilderness medicine, and health care management. Kirsch has real-life disaster experience, including local incidents; hurricanes Katrina and Rita; the New York City response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and New Zealand; and the 2010 floods in Pakistan.
Kirsch 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, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance of the United States Agency for International Development.
His research activities focus on developing methods to measure the impact and quality of disaster response; working with the engineering community to assessing the impact on, and resiliency of healthcare systems in disaster (particularly earthquakes); and creating physiologic triage tools to improve hospital resource utilization in a disaster response. In addition to teaching medical students and residents emergency medicine, he teaches Introduction to Humanitarian Emergencies and Public Health Issues in Disasters at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. He teaches Wilderness Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He also directs a disaster fellowship.
