News & Media Specialist Joins Staff
The AIT Community welcomes Mr. Ralf E. Kircher (right) who joined AIT as News and Media Specialist, External Relations and Communications Office, on 17 January 2006. In that capacity, Mr. Kircher will be internationally promoting public awareness of AIT's faculty, students, alumni and projects.
An American native from Florida, Mr. Kircher received his Bachelor of Arts in English from Dartmouth College in 1991.
Most recently before joining AIT, Mr. Kircher volunteered as director of public relations for a disaster relief organization that helped victims of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the southern United States in September 2005.
Prior to that, he was a freelance writer in Phuket, Thailand, covering the tsunami disaster for the American newswire, Scripps Howard News Service. While on a yearlong sabbatical, he was staying in a beach-front hotel whose first floor was destroyed when the waves hit. From the perspective of a survivor, a participant and a witness, he wrote a series of stories and follow-ups that were picked up by newspapers across the United States and in six countries.
Mr. Kircher spent the previous eight years working for the Naples Daily News in Florida, where he worked for eight years, as assistant city editor, assistant features editor, senior staff writer and finally features editor.
While serving as a writer, Mr. Kircher concentrated on special projects, which included such award-winning foreign assignments as Africa, Cuba and Haiti. Domestic award-winning projects included a special section on the role of fresh water in Florida's environment and separate stories on hiking, canoeing and sailing across the Everglades.
Mr. Kircher served as editor of two other Florida newspapers for three years before joining the Naples newspaper.
His experience in public relations includes political appointments in Washington, D.C. He was a writer-editor in the Office of Public Affairs of the U.S. Department of Energy from 1991 to 1992, where he wrote and placed editorials and a series of articles on technology transfer under the Secretary of Energy's byline. From 1992 to 1993, he worked at the U.S. Treasury Department where he served as an assistant to the Undersecretary for Domestic Finance, preparing a report on the origins of the U.S. bond market to the newly democratic Albanian government.
Mr. Kircher can be contacted temporarily at room 230, Library Building, tel. ext. 5841. E-mail: ralfk@ait.ac.th<p