Faculty Directory

Michael Furst

Bio

Mike Furst is the chairman of NG Capital, LLC, a private investment company formerly based in Beijing. NG Capital sold its China investments in 2017 and relocated its headquarters to the United States. NG Capital and its predecessor entities have been active in capital investment since 2006 and are currently focused on biotech and social commerce.

At Northeastern Law, Professor Furst teaches International Trade Law and Global Regulation. His areas of focus in the law include entrepreneurship law, international trade law and regulation, intellectual property law, corporate governance and nonprofit law. He is a member of the American Bar Association and the Manhattan Institute.

Professor Furst has held a number of academic appointments in China and the United States. He was professor of economics and business at the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies and served as associate dean and professor at the Beijing International MBA Program at Peking University’s China Center for Economic Research, where he worked closely with Justin Yifu Lin, who later became chief economist at the World Bank. He has also been on the faculty of the Grossman School of Business at the University of Vermont and has lectured at the National Defense University and was the Mitsui Professor of Business at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing and managing director of Omega Management Ltd., a Hong Kong–based consultancy. He has also worked for Bank of America, Bear Stearns and Standard Chartered Bank. In the mid-1970s, he studied under management theorist Peter Drucker.

From 1998 to 2003, Professor Furst served as executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. In that role, he was one of a small group of people central to the effort to bring China into the World Trade Organization and to extend Permanent Normal Trade Relations to China, representing the American business community in the People’s Republic of China throughout the process. He has frequently advised both the United States and Chinese governments on U.S.-China trade issues and has consulted with the Beijing municipal government on a wide range of matters. In Hong Kong, he worked as a consultant to private- and public-sector clients, including Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption. He also served as U.S. warden with the American Embassy in Beijing.

Professor Furst serves on the Elmore, Vermont, Development Review Board, a quasi-judicial body that adjudicates land use and zoning matters, including the approval and denial of conditional use permits. He is also vice president of the board of the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival.

Professor Furst’s family includes a number of accomplished ancestors, among them the composer Jacques Offenbach, the Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Max Perutz and the novelist Leo Perutz.