Currently, he is professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i Manoa,[3] and a member of the board of directors of the Bishop Museum.
While there, he was studying Linnaean taxonomy and helped curate his mentor's collection of Polynesian snail shells.
[4] A year later, securing the permission of a landowner and some help from his father, Kirch had dug out a three-by-three-foot test pit at Hālawa on Molokai.
In the midden of the pit, he found bone and shell fragments, which he carefully assembled, counted and wrote up results on.
The results made Emory furious, but Kondo insisted that Kirch did everything right and therefore deserved to go with him to the South Point's excavation site.
He is a member of the advisory board of the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust, advising on the preservation of cultural sites.
Patrick V. Kirch | Anthropology Department, UC Berkeley Retrieved April 22, 2022.