Michael Birt is Executive Director of the Pacific Health Summit and Director of Center for Sustainable Health at the Biodesign Institute of Arizona State University. Previously, he was Vice President, Health and Society and Director of the Center for Health and Aging (CHA) at NBR. He also holds the position of Affiliate Investigator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Prior to founding the Center for Health and Aging at NBR, Dr. Birt had extensive experience in the private sector and the academic world as well as non-profits. In his academic career, Michael Birt was an assistant professor at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, an assistant professor at Wellesley College, and a Fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. He has served as a visiting professor at Keio University under a faculty grant from the Japan Foundation and as a nominated recipient of a Ministry of Education faculty appointment at Hitotsubashi University. He has published peer-reviewed articles in his field’s pre-eminent journal, The Journal of Japanese Studies. He received his PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University and is fluent in spoken and written Japanese. He also completed the Certificate Program in Gerontology at the University of Washington.

Dr. Birt’s private sector experience includes the successful launch, development and stock sale of a leading U.S.-Asia biomedical business development company, a U.S.-registered corporation with offices in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. He also founded Infoplan Consulting, a division of McCann-Erickson Hakuhodo, a leading advertising and market research firm located in Tokyo. He has consulted for many of the world’s leading healthcare, medical technology, and consumer product companies. He is co-author of Negotiating the Gray Maze: The Business of Medicine in Japan (1997) and has written articles for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, as well as numerous industry consulting reports. His is also author of the unpublished novel, TR-TB, a medical thriller set in Japan.

Michael Birt also personally funded and led the Pacific Health Alliance, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation, which focused on the development of educational exchange and collaboration programs between U.S. and Japanese healthcare delivery systems in the field of hospital infection control.

Dr. Birt first traveled to Asia in 1975 and has since made the trans-Pacific flight well over one hundred times. He and his wife, Debra, have lived in Japan for a total of seven years, five of those years with their two children Kathleen and Sally.