Professors at Work

Rida Elias, assistant professor at the Olayan School of Business, explains what she has discovered by researching top leadership succession in corporations. Too often CEOs, whose work is 75% with people and institutions outside the firm, refuse to leave power. This leads to messy successions, which is why she recommends 4-6-month-long transition periods for CEO changes. COOs, on the other hand, mostly deal with internal issues, where the succession is less complex.

AUB’s Laboratories for the Environment, Agriculture and Food (LEAF), directed by Associate Professor Mohamad Abiad of the Nutrition and Food Sciences Department at the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences, explains how the labs play a national role well beyond the university campus. They regularly sample and test food, water, soil, and air samples to identify dangers and affirm the safety of the many elements that ultimately end up inside our bodies. They now also test the grains left in the port after the 2020 explosion, to determine which could be safely consumed by humans or animals, and which can be recycled for compost, heating briquets, and other useful materials. Smuggled and untested imported food, though, remains a problem for the country.

Alissar Yehya is an assistant professor in AUB’s civil and environmental engineering department whose research in Lebanon aims to bridge the gaps between engineering solutions, environmental sustainability, social justice, and gender equity. She does this by exploring technical and social dimensions of “period poverty” among women who lack access to menstrual products, water and sanitation facilities, or relevant knowledge. She explains how she and her colleagues create human-centered and eco-effective strategies to manufacture reusable menstrual pads that are affordable, effective, and not harmful to the environment. That’s where local banana fibers enter this picture of pioneering efforts that join hard science and design with social and environmental equity.

Marco Bardus, assistant professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences department of health promotion and community health, has spent his last 15 years at AUB exploring how digital technologies – cellphones, apps, laptops and others – can successfully promote health interventions. He has experimented with digital social marketing that targets individuals, families, or the entire community, always aiming to nudge citizens to adopt better health habits. The Covid-19 era, he explains, has opened new vistas of digital applications that can save time and money, and increase people’s access to health care.

Lara Nasreddine, tenured professor of nutrition and food sciences at the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences, has conducted research since 2007 that identifies alarming trends in diet-related diseases across Lebanon. She explains how diet is among the top three risk factors for death, how youth are a most vulnerable age group for food marketers, and why eating habits formed early in life critically shape lifelong habits – which is why she focuses now on early life nutrition habits.

AUB professor of chemistry Bilal Kaafarani describes how in his 18 years at AUB he has pioneered new means of “transformative education” that allow students to learn by engaging in activities beyond the classroom. He explains the benefits and power of “experiential learning” opportunities by which undergraduate students partner with alumni, professors, successful professionals, and other students, including in open chemistry competitions, that link teaching with students’ real life experiences.

Dr Ghazi Zaatari, professor and chair of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at AUB Medical Center, is a world leader in studying the impact of tobacco on people’s health and advocating for reducing the use of tobacco products. He founded the Tobacco Research Group at AUB and heads the WHO Study Group on Tobacco Products Regulation. In this episode he retraces his journey from a young scientist who was alarmed by the high rates of cancer in Lebanon to a global leader in advocating for control of the promotion and use of cigarettes, water pipes, vaping products and other damaging habits.

Dr Nuhad Dumit, Associate Professor at the Hariri School of Nursing and coordinator of the Nursing Administration and Management Track Masters degree, explains how she and her colleagues have spent years understanding the many factors that prompt Lebanese nurses to emigrate abroad – or from rural areas to Beirut – which has resulted in a serious shortage of nurses across the country. Salaries and the work environment play big roles in this, and she is now also exploring whether sexual harassment at work is also a factor. New models of nursing care have maintained health care standards to date, but danger lurks if the nursing sector continues along its current trajectory.

Joe Bahout, director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI) and associate professor of Political Studies and Public Administration, analyzes the stresses and weaknesses of today’s Arab states that largely ignored or marginalized their societies and citizens. The resurgence of society on the national stage today, he says, gives IFI and AUB an unprecedented opportunity to impact state policies in Lebanon and the region.

Sahar Assaf, on leave from her post as AUB Assistant Professor of Theater Arts and co-director of the Theater Initiative, is executive artistic director of the Golden Thread Productions company in San Francisco. She recounts her lifelong professional and personal journey from her youth in Lebanon, when she saw theater as an escape into an alternative world where one could remain happy; in recent years she discovered the transformative power of ‘documentary theater’ – no longer a means of escape, but a way to fight forward and resist the stresses and injustices of the status quo. On her journey, she also seeks to show the ‘spaces of joy’ in the Middle East that are not often portrayed abroad.