TRMH Team

University of California, Davis

Suad Joseph
Distinguished Research Professor, Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies;
Director, UCDAR, Global Affairs

Dr. Suad Joseph is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies and scholar of Middle East gender and family studies.  She founded a group leading to the establishment of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association; she founded the Association for Middle East Women's Studies and co-founded its internationally recognized journal – Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies; she founded the Arab Families Research Group; and a six-university consortium. She co-founded the Arab American Studies Association and the Association for Middle East Anthropology.  She was the president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, the main professional association for scholars of the Middle East. She co-founded the Women and Gender Studies Program and founded the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program at UC Davis. She is the recipient of numerous awards including: the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Research, the largest such prize in the United States; the graduate mentor award by the Consortium for Women and Research, and the Diversity Leadership award and the Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award by UC Davis.  She is General Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures- the first encyclopedia of its kind, which Choice, the magazine for librarians, ranked as “essential” for libraries. She has edited or co-edited 8 books, and published over 100 articles. For the past decade and half, she has offered training in proposal writing and research design to young scholars in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.

Email: sjoseph@ucdavis.edu

 

American University in Cairo (AUC)

Kate Ellis
Associate Professor of Psychology

 Dr. Kate Ellis is an assistant professor of psychology at The American University in Cairo, and serves as both the graduate programs director and the coordinator of the leadership in mental health course.  She is also a clinical psychologist who works predominantly with refugees and individuals who have experienced trauma. Her research focuses on the impact of violence and conflict, with a focus on young people. Dr. Ellis has published several peer reviewed works regarding the experiences of young people exposed to community and political violence). She has also published works on the mental health experiences of ‘looked after children' and the challenges faced by detained youth offenders). Dr Ellis has recently completed an empirical study, training lay counselors from a Sudanese refugee population to deliver narrative exposure therapy within their community. Currently, Ellis is involved in projects to develop and evaluate intervention programs in conflict-affected settings such as Egypt, upscaling mental health interventions in low economic countries and developing accessible online, culturally appropriate interventions for trauma in Egyptian Arabic.

Email: kate.ellis@aucegypt.edu

 

University of California, Davis

Raquel E Aldana
Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity; Professor of Law

Raquel E. Aldana is Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity at UC Davis and a Professor of Law at the School of Law. She joined UC Davis in 2017. Aldana is a graduate of Arizona State University (earning a bachelor’s degree in English and another in Spanish) and Harvard Law School. She was a professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, before joining the McGeorge School of Law faculty in 2009. Her scholarship has focused on transitional justice and criminal justice reforms in Latin America as well as immigrant rights in the United States. She has taught immigration law and international human rights, lawyering for immigrants, “crimmigration,” criminal law and procedure, international labor law, and Latin American comparative law. She founded and directed the McGeorge School of Law’s Inter-American Program, which trains bilingual and bicultural lawyers for transnational careers or to work with the growing Latino population in the United States. She served as the school’s associate dean for faculty scholarship, 2013–17. She is co-editing From Extraction to Emancipation: Development Reimagined, a forthcoming book from the American Bar Association. She was recently re-elected to the Latin America and Caribbean Council of the ABA’s Rule of Law Initiative, and previously served as the co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Guatemala in 2006 and 2007.

Email: realdana@ucdavis.edu

American University of Beirut (AUB):

Mohamed Fouad

Assistant Research Professor and Co- Director of the Refugee Health Program, Global Health Initiative (GHI)
Department of Epidemiology & Population Health, Faculty of Health Sciences

Dr. Fouad’s current research interests focus on Syrian displacement inside Syria and the neighboring countries, as well as the impact of this crisis on their health and well-being. From 2002-2012, Dr. Fouad served as Director of the National Institute of Health (NIH)-funded Syrian Center for Tobacco studies, where he coordinated multiple health promotion studies. Fouad is a co-author in several commentary publications in The Lancet as well as the international Journal of Public Health on assessing the Syrian’s health crisis and the response to this devastating event. Currently, he is a PI of a project funded by Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University on Refugee Health Policy with a focus on NCDs among Syrian refugees in three countries; Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. Also, he is a co-PI of a project funded by Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises- ELHRA on identifying ways to promote health systems resilience in contexts of protracted displacement through systems analysis of UNRWA provision to Palestine refugees displaced by the Syria crisis. Fouad is serving as a commissioner in two Lancet Commissions; AUB Lancet Commission: Syria and the crises in global governance, health and aid, and UCL-Lancet Commission on Migration and Health.

Email: mm157@aub.edu.lb​​​

​​​​​University of California, Davis​​

Patrick Marius Koga
Associate Professor and Director of Ulysses Postdoctoral Refugee Health Research Program 

Division of Epidemiology, Department of Public Health Sciences
UC Davis School of Medicine 

For the past 30 years Dr. Koga’s work in transcultural psychiatry focused on refugee trauma. Globally, his work spans Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, Türkiye, and the Arab Region; domestically he conducted extensive research in California, including the performance of mental evaluations at Sacramento County Refugee Health Clinic with newly arriving Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, and Congolese. Research range: cultural, religious, and spiritual modulators of trauma resilience, idioms of distress, Ulysses Syndrome, cultural retooling, refugee domestic violence, neuroscience of migrant retraumatization, medicalization of social suffering, and colonization of knowledge production.   A former Dean of International Medicine in Cambridge, UK, and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tulane School of Medicine, Dr. Koga is a member of the World      Psychiatric Association, (WPA) / Transcultural Psychiatry Section, the Athena Network, UC Davis Global Migration Center, and a Fellow of the Royal Societies for Public Health, and for Medicine, London, UK.

Email: pmkoga@ucdavis.edu 

 

Birzeit University

Rita Giacaman
Professor of Public Health
Institute of Community and Public Health

Dr. Rita Giacaman is a professor of public health at the Institute of Community and Public Health, Birzeit University, West Bank, occupied Palestinian territory. The founder of the Institute, Rita's current work focuses on the development of measures to assess psycho-social health which are relevant and appropriate for context, and ways in which interventions could generate active and positive resilience and resistance to ongoing war like conditions, especially among youth.

Members of the Institute work in teams, combining various disciplines and sub-disciplines in conducting research. Our approach in multidisciplinary, we draw on classical public health, medical and other disciplinary theories and methods. In addition, we also draw on sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, engineering and other disciplines whenever relevant to our research questions.  The Institute’s collaborative research interest include: Non-communicable diseases and associated factors, War and health, Women’s health, Mental health, Violence and health (political, domestic and communal), The development of metrics to assess the effects of violence on health, Young people’s health and wellbeing, Adolescent health and well being, and Demography and population (especially fertility, but also maternal, infant and child mortality).

Email: rita@birzeit.edu

 Lebanese American University (LAU)

Carmel H. Bouclaous
Associate Professor
Gilbert & Rose-Marie Chagoury School of Medicine

Dr. Carmel H. Bouclaous is Assistant Professor at Gilbert and Rose-Marie Chagoury School of Medicine Lebanese American University (LAU), Lebanon. She teaches social medicine and global health and serves as the social medicine discipline coordinator. Dr. Bouclaous holds a PhD in Development Studies from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva-Switzerland, a Master of Public Health and a Master of Nutrition from the American University of Beirut-Lebanon. Her research interests lie at the intersection of public health, nutrition, development, and sustainability. She focuses on the effects of the social, political and economic environments on health. She has a number of peer-reviewed publications. She was the appointed Director of Academic Affairs at the school and was involved with faculty and student-related issues including academic recruitment and peer review of faculty members. She is the NBME’s Executive Chief Proctor for LAU responsible for instituting the customized assessments and the subject exams of the American National Board of Medical Examiners. As member of the school’s accreditation and registration steering committee, she is championing the governance and administration standard required for accreditation by the World Federation for Medical Education. She is advisor to the Lebanese Medical Students’ International Committee (LeMSIC) and LAU’s Medical Student Association (MSA). With LeMSIC, she coordinates the medical student exchange program where the school welcomes a number of international students annually. She oversees the activities of MSA such as national screening events, health awareness campaigns, and fundraising activities. Prior to joining LAU, Dr. Bouclaous worked extensively in healthcare management. She is currently serving a six-year term as council member of her hometown of Beit El Chaar -Lebanon.

Email: carmel.bouclaous@lau.edu.lb

American University of Beirut (AUB):

Lilian A. Ghandour, PhD MPH
Associate Professor
Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, Faculty of Health Sciences

Dr. Ghandour received her PhD from the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from AUB. Dr. Ghandour has been involved in the design and analyses of various national and international surveys related to youth mental health. Mainly, her research focuses on understanding the epidemiology of substance-related and other addictive behaviors, specifically the nonmedical use of psychoactive prescription drugs, underage and harmful alcohol consumption, as well as general mental health disorders in children and adolescents. Dr. Ghandour is also involved in translational research, conducting local epidemiological research to help inform national policies and practices. She has received several extramural research grants and awards for her work on youth mental health, and has published extensively in high tier peer-reviewed journals. 

At AUB, Dr Ghandour has been responsible for teaching and contributing to several undergraduate and graduate courses in Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Public health. She has taught a variety of student populations (undergraduate health science students, graduate public health students, medical students) as well as physicians and health professionals, both at and outside of AUB. 

Email: lg01@aub.edu.lb

 

Osama Tanous

Dr. Osama Tanous is a pediatrician and public health scholar. He is a co-director of the Palestine Program of Health and Human Rights at FXB center Harvard University. Osama is a 2020-2021 Hubert H. Humphrey fellow of public health and health policy at the Rollin School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta and a visiting researcher at UC Davis, Department of Public Health Sciences. He is a board member of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel and B’tselem, The Israeli information center for human rights in the occupied territories. Osama’s writings and work focus on the intersection of settler colonialism, state structural violence, and health. He is examining how these factors shape the living conditions, behaviors, and thus the health of Palestinians. 

Email: osama.tenous@gmail.com

 

Nadine Hosny

Nadine Hosny, MSc, is a psychotherapist and doctoral researcher at the Cultural Clinical Psychology Lab at the Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She studies cultural concepts of distress, complex trauma, and the development of culturally congruent interventions. She is also an affiliate researcher in the Department of Psychology at the American University in Cairo, and a visiting research scholar at the at the University of California, Davis, working as a part of the Transforming Refugee Mental Health project team.

Email: nadinehosy@aucegpyt.edu