Hiroaki Matsuura is Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Shoin University in Japan, where he is also Professor of Health Economics and Demography in the Faculty of Tourism, Media and Cultural Studies, of which he previously served as Dean from 2019 to 2021. Before assuming his current position, he held the position of Lecturer at the University of Oxford's School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. He is a health economist and demographer by training, with research expertise in identifying populations whose right to health and to a healthy environment is being violated, and in evaluating the effectiveness of policies aimed at addressing these deprivations.
He currently serves as Chair of the WHO Technical Advisory Group on the Economics of Environment, Climate Change and Health, and as a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Embedding Ethics in Health and Climate Change Policy. He has also served on the UN Tourism's World Committee on Tourism Ethics and has held consultant/expert roles with UNDP, UNFPA, UNU-WIDER, and other international organisations. He is Editor-in-Chief of Biodemography and Social Biology and serves on the editorial boards of Demographic Research and the International Journal of Social Welfare, among others. He also coordinates the Human Rights Section of the Human Development and Capability Association.
He received his B.A. in Economics from Keio University, an M.A. in Social Science from the University of Chicago, an M.S. from Northwestern University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, and an Sc.D. in Global Health and Population (Economics track) from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is a Fellow of the Royal Economic Society, the Royal Society for Public Health, and the Higher Education Academy.