Lebanon

Site Insitution: American University of Beirut
Research Areas: Occupational Health and Safety,

Site Description:

The American University of Beirut (AUB) was founded in 1866 as a private, independent, non-sectarian institution of higher learning, functioning under a charter from the State of New York. Since its founding, AUB has set excellence standards in higher education worldwide.

The Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) was the first and is currently the leading school of public health in the region. Through its vital regional role in conducting state of the art research, producing evidence-based knowledge, and advocating for social justice, AUB-FHS is guided by its vision and mission to shape the regional and global public health discourse as the leading public health academic institutions in the Middle Eastern region. FHS has 12 graduate and undergraduate degree programs, outreach and training activities, and a multimillion U.S. dollar, internationally and domestically funded research portfolio spanning the five academic departments (Environmental Health, Epidemiology and Population Health, Health Promotion and Community Health, Health Management and Policy, and Medical Laboratory Sciences). The Graduate Public Health Program (GPHP) at FHS encompasses a MS in Environmental Health, Master of Public Health (MPH), an MS in Epidemiology and a PhD in Epidemiology. All graduate public health programs at FHS are accredited by the council on public health education (CEPH). FHS hosts the only CEPH – accredited programs in the region. FHS is also actively engaged in training, service, advocacy efforts and policy making about public health priorities in Lebanon and the region. FHS hosts three centers that serve as facilitators and platforms for research, practice, and knowledge translation.

The Center for Research on Population and Health (CRPH) established in 2002 strengthens multidisciplinary research at AUB and serves as a hub of many regional and local research networks. It fosters interdisciplinary research through seminars and conferences that bring expertise in methodologies and approaches from other disciplines to FHS. The center has a cross disciplinarian research agenda that focuses on social and structural determinants of health and on the intervention research to inform regional public health practice and policy.

The Center for Public Health Practice (CPHP) established in 2009 develops and implements community engagement services. It coordinates training and workforce development workshops customized to meet the specific needs of public health agencies both in Lebanon and the region. It also coordinates the service learning courses and placement of graduate students with agencies for their practical experience. CPHP is an essential partner in the humanitarian engineering course that brings together public health and engineering students to find innovative solutions for refugees’ public health problem

The Knowledge-to-Policy (K2P) Center, launched in 2015, is committed to the challenge of putting knowledge into policy and action and translating research into policy options for decision makers. It produces policy relevant products such as policy briefs, briefing notes, evidence summaries, dialogue summaries, and media bytes. K2P builds the capacity of research networks, policy makers, civil society, researchers and media professionals. The center convenes policy dialogs and conducts policy relevant research. K2P is designated by the World Health Organization as a WHO collaborating center for evidence informed policymaking in Lebanon in the Middle East region.

AUB has a history of collaboration with leading global institutions, including Yale University. The partnership with Yale has extended from more than 12 years. It includes the following highlights:

• Dr. Hani Mowafi (Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Chief of the Section of Global Health and International Emergency Medicine in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale University) and Dr. Iman Nuwayhid (Former Dean & Professor FHS, AUB) are partnered through the NIH D43 Injury Research Training Grant (2021-2026) and the NIH U01/U2R GeoHealth Hub award (2022-2027). Their partnership builds upon a dozen years of collaboration dating back to the Yale-AUB Conflict and Health conference in 2009.
• Dr. Mowafi and Dr. Samar Al-Hajj (Assistant Research Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences, American University of Beirut) have been partnered since 2015 through the WHO Mentor VIP program. They continued their mentoring relationship and collaboration on multiple injury research, which lead to their successful application for the NIH D43 to establish the Middle East and North Africa Program for Advanced Injury Research (MENA PAIR), with Dr. Al-Hajj as the Co-PI on that award
• Dr. Nuwayhid spent six months at Yale from January to July 2022 as visiting professor of the council of Middle East studies where he explored and develop potential collaborations with different units at the Yale School Public Health, including the Global Health Equity Scholars program.
• Dr. Nuwayhid is currently collaborating with the Yale Center for Climate Change and Health to submit a proposal to Wellcome Trust (application date September 5, 2022) on an intervention study to prevent heat-related illnesses among Syrian refugee agricultural workers in Lebanon
• Dr. Mowafi contributed a chapter on emergency preparedness to the landmark book on “Public Health in the Arab world” (Cambridge university press, 2013) that was edited by Dr. Nuwayhid and other faculty at the American University of Beirut.
• Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood (Associate Professor, Yale school of Public Health) has collaborated with a number of colleagues at FHS on research and training activities related to HIV/AIDS, research ethics, and refugee health for over 10 years.