Professors at Work

Biology Professor Imad Saoud, a specialist in agriculture and aquatic science, is fermenting restaurant food waste and feeding 1000 fish in a pond at AUB's Beqaa Valley Agricultural Station. He and his colleagues are exploring the potential for producing animal feed at a fraction of commercial prices, mainly to feed fish, poultry, and cows for now. He explains his scientific journey and the potential of their research.

Prof Kathryn Maude explains how her Medieval women studies link with AUB's gender initiative that she co-directs.

An ongoing, year-long, analysis of the impacts of cash grants to Syrian refugees in Lebanon reveals some striking results, including that the grants reduce the risk of child labor and early marriage of women. If so, these benefits will impact successive generations, explains Economics Associate Professor Dr. Nisreen Salti.

Dr Ali Ahmad's research career at Cambridge, Princeton, AUB and Harvard Universities now sees him focus on the complex links among energy, nuclear power, security across the Middle East. As an AUB- Issam Fares Institute senior fellow and a research scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, he explains the positive developments in these sectors as well as the hard decisions that must be made soon on energy subsidies, sustainability, environmental protection, and other critical issues. Water stress and the expected impacts of climate change add urgency to new inter-disciplinary efforts in nuclear power and energy resilience.

The day after the August port explosion in Beirut, dozens of AUB faculty and students spontaneously visited the damaged region of Beirut to see how they could help the citizens in need to rebuild structures, lives, and entire communities. Khaddit Beirut was born as a platform that brings together multi-discipline expertise from AUB and other universities in housing, health care, small businesses, and education, to recover and reconstruct urban lives and communities. Chemistry professor Najat Saliba, co-founder and co-director of Khaddit Beirut, explains how they go about breaking entrenched networks of corruption and clientelism, to restore trust among citizens, experts, and even some honest officials.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Anaheed Al-Hardan and colleagues in Ghana, South Africa and elsewhere in the South explore the theoretical, literary, and political dimensions of promising global solidarity movements in the 1950s and 60s that ultimately succumbed to imperial and capitalist powers and splits within the South.

Food and Agricultural Sciences Professor Rami Zurayk, director of the Food Security Program, shares his findings on how food systems work or don't work efficiently in the Arab region, and where researchers can use their knowledge to identify inflection points in the public policies and power relations of Arab societies that can promote more family-scale productive farms. Vulnerable farmers who are forced to leave their farms and become unemployed urban poor are one major living sign of the distortions in prevailing Arab states' food systems and neglect of agriculture.

Philosophy professor and AUB Director of General Education Bana Bashour explains why a General Education curriculum is mandatory and how it helps enrich students' skills and capacity to navigate an increasingly complex world. She reviews how the changes are being made and what results they might have.

Faculty of Health Sciences tenured Associate Professor Rima Nakkash has headed the Tobacco Control Research Group and the AUB tobacco-free campus task force since their inception. She explains the challenges they've faced in working to influence government policies, in order to create regulations that in turn change social norms and individual behavior. 

Evidence-informed advocacy in partnerships with others in society has been key to some successes -- and lessons learned are now being applied to the fight against COVID-19.

We examine AUB English Professor Robert Myers and his colleague Sonja Mejcher-Atassi’s new book, The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous – A critical study of the Syrian playwright and public intellectual, which explores the life and work of the late Syrian dramatist and intellectual. Many of Wannous’ political, social, and intellectual concerns still reverberate widely across the Arab region, and remind us of the creative artist’s responsibility and impact in all sectors of life.