Thomas D. Kirsch
Thomas D. Kirsch is an American physician, scientist, and writer who has built a career around disaster preparedness and response. Recognized as an expert in disaster research, planning, and response, as well as disaster and wilderness medicine, his work spans national and international settings.
Born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1957, Kirsch grew up moving often before his family settled in Omaha, Nebraska. He first encountered disaster work as a high school volunteer with the American Red Cross after an Omaha tornado. He earned a B.A. in fine arts from Creighton University in 1980, then an M.D. from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in 1984. He later earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) from Johns Hopkins in 1986. His medical training included a surgical internship in New York City, a Preventive Medicine residency at Johns Hopkins, and an Emergency Medicine residency at the Georgetown/George Washington program, completed in 1990. Kirsch skipped his medical school graduation to provide care in a Cambodian refugee camp in 1984, a decision that helped steer his career toward humanitarian work.
His early career included work with the World Health Organization (1986–87) on immunizations in South Asia and the Pacific. He chose emergency medicine training to support humanitarian and global health efforts. From 1990 to 1995 he was on the Johns Hopkins faculty, focusing on global emergency medicine and humanitarian response with projects in Trinidad and Tobago, Ethiopia, Bhutan, Cambodia, and Myanmar. He wrote influential articles on building emergency medicine training worldwide. In Chicago (1995–1998) he served as Chair of Emergency Medicine at Michael Reese Hospital and co-founded the Resurrection-Michael Reese Emergency Medicine residency.
Kirsch returned to Johns Hopkins (2004–2016), becoming a full professor in 2010 with appointments in the School of Medicine, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Whiting School of Engineering. He directed Emergency Medicine Operations and the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response, and he developed the Austere Medicine Course and the Hopkins Hospital Emergency Airway Course. His research explored measuring the impact of disaster response and how earthquakes affect a hospital’s ability to deliver care.
Since 2016 he has led the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health at the Uniformed Services University, where he is a Professor of Military and Emergency Medicine and Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics. He also holds adjunct roles at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins. Kirsch has consulted for many organizations, including the CDC, WHO, UNICEF, PAHO, FEMA, and various U.S. government agencies and Red Cross chapters.
Beyond academia, Kirsch has remained active with the Red Cross, volunteering from 1992 to 2017 and serving as Medical Advisor (2000–2010) and on the Scientific Advisory Council (2006–2016). He has responded to major disasters such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and epidemics and earthquakes worldwide. In 2014 he was honored in a White House ceremony for Ebola response work.
Kirsch is also a prolific writer, with more than 150 scientific articles, book chapters, and editorials, including pieces in The Washington Post. He has written personal essays about Haiti’s earthquake response and contributions to national and international discussions on disaster preparedness and response. He has received numerous awards, including the American College of Emergency Physicians’ Disaster Medical Science Award in 2013 and the Clara Barton Award from the American Red Cross in 2014, among others.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 09:25 (CET).