Dr. Charafeddine explains why parental mental health is not “extra”—it’s part of the care plan. Babies need nurturing caregivers to thrive, and caregivers need psychological, emotional, and social support to provide that care. While robust services like counseling, home visits, and referral pathways are often limited, costly, or inaccessible in fragile contexts, low-resource practices can still make a meaningful difference. We explore approaches like kangaroo care (skin-to-skin contact) and family-centered developmental care, and why strengthening the “ecosystem” around parents is foundational to improving outcomes for preterm infants.

In this episode, we talk with Joseph Zeaiter, professor at the American University of Beirut (Baha and Walid Bassatne Department of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Energy), whose team is working to reframe tire waste as a resource. His latest research explores a practical, scalable idea: using an inexpensive mineral-based catalyst—a nickel- and cerium-doped zeolite—to dramatically increase the amount of hydrogen and syngas you can recover during the recycling/treatment process.

As a young pathologist, Riyad El-Khoury spent long days hunched over a microscope—an intense, repetitive craft where fatigue is part of the job. Today, as associate professor of pathology and head of the Muhieddine Al-Ahdab Neuromuscular Diagnostic Laboratory at the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC), he’s helping push pathology into a new era: AI-assisted diagnosis.

In this episode, El-Khoury explains why the first big shift is going digital—turning glass slides into high-resolution images that AI can analyze at scale—and why the next leap may be even bigger: prediction. He also explores a provocative possibility: a future where AI moves beyond assistance and, in some workflows, operates autonomously—raising urgent questions about bias, generalizability, interpretability, and what it will take to build systems that are safe, equitable, and worthy of clinical trust.

What happens when a disaster hits—and the state can’t (or won’t) respond? In this episode, urban studies professor Mona Harb, co-founder of the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut, takes us inside Beirut’s post–port explosion recovery through the lens of “urban commoning”: the collective creation, repair, and shared management of urban spaces and resources outside state control. From Nation Station—a community hub born in an abandoned gas station—to a citywide ecosystem of organizers, nonprofits, faith-based networks, professional teams, political actors, and diaspora-led initiatives, Harb’s research traces how communities became de facto urban governors. But the episode also explores the limits: why some efforts stalled under politics, property disputes, donor constraints, and neighborhood tensions—and what it would take for urban commons to endure.

After the 2020 Beirut port blast, curator-archaeologist Nadine Panayot led a tech-enabled rescue at AUB’s Archaeological Museum—digitizing archives, virtually reconstructing shattered Roman glass, and scanning sites across Lebanon. She shares how community collaboration, ethical digitization, and practical tools are building resilient heritage systems ahead of her Nov 18 talk at The Met.

Environmental microbiologist Darine Salam explains why boosting native beach microbes (biostimulation) often cleans coastlines faster and with fewer side effects than chemicals or lab-engineered “superbugs.” Her team’s work shows how sampling first and dosing nutrients wisely lets nature do the heavy lifting.

AUB’s Daniel Asmar explains MGSO, a new system that turns a single phone camera into a real-time 3D mapper. It builds dense, photorealistic maps at ~30 fps using “Gaussian splats,” enabling AR, robotics, and everyday apps without special sensors.

At COP30, we look to places that have lived with heat for millennia. AUB Nature Conservation Center director Yaser Abunnasr explains how Middle Eastern indigenous knowledge—embedded in architecture, agriculture, and social norms—can guide fair, practical climate action. We spotlight NCC’s Med Trails project and a “local first, scale out” model that turns evidence from communities into usable tools and training.

Lebanon’s reliance on ~35,000 diesel generators—8–10k in Beirut alone—may be fueling one of the world’s highest bladder cancer rates. Dr. Hassan Dhaini (AUB Faculty of Health Sciences) explains his team’s multi-phase research on quasi-ultrafine particulates from generators, what those particles carry (carcinogens, heavy metals, mutagens), how they travel through the body, and why a known genetic susceptibility in Lebanese populations could be creating a “perfect storm.” He also lays out near-term fixes (diesel particulate filters and catalytic converters) and the longer-term pivot to cleaner energy.

A tiny sticker on a stop sign can fool an autonomous vehicle’s vision—no laptop needed. Professor Ali Chehab (American University of Beirut) explains a new “seatbelt for perception”: a model-agnostic defense that rides alongside existing self-driving software to catch adversarial tricks on road signs and lane markers in real time.