GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCHER & PRACTITIONER
How to shape health systems that learn from, adapt to, and serve
the people who need them most?
the people who need them most?
Working across disciplines, sectors, and continents, the question has remained the same.
The tools and settings change, but the work always comes back to the same gap between what systems do and what people actually need.
| 15+ years Humanitarian, development, academic, & clinical sectors | MD Damascus University | MSPH Epidemiology · Emory University · Fulbright Scholar | PhD Health Policy and Systems · Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam · Erasmus Mundus Scholar |
Published in Health Policy & Planning, Annals of Epidemiology, Global Health Action, The Lancet Oncology, Gastroenterology, among others.
My Story
How I came to this work
This career path was shaped by curiosity, the realities of life, and the opportunities I pursued and was fortunate to encounter.
Starting point · Syria · United States
"I didn't plan to work in global health."
I entered medical school in Syria at 16. It is hard to say what drew me to medicine. I grew up in a family where contributing positively to the world around you was of the highest value. It was only through voluntary work with the Red Crescent that I began to see the different forces that shape people's lives and health and to discover the central role of public health. In 2010, I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study epidemiology in the United States. Seven months later, Syria began its needed and painful change.
Learning from the field · Syria · Jordan · Iraq · Vietnam
"Context is evidence, not just anecdote. Numbers & stories deserve equal rigor."
I worked in humanitarian settings across Syria, Jordan, and Iraq with IRC, MSF, CDC, and WHO: building disease surveillance systems, coordinating outbreak responses, and managing primary healthcare clinics. But I found that my quantitative training alone could not capture what I was seeing on the ground.
Aiming to develop my qualitative research skills, I pursued a PhD that took me to Vietnam to study how primary healthcare systems support people living with hypertension. For the first time, I worked in a context where I didn't share a language, which prompted me to question my role as an outsider and to reflect on Orientalism in general and the ethics in global health in particular. Through it, I became a researcher who understands that how you know matters as much as what you know, and that the expertise to analyze problems and find solutions is rarely imported – it lives in the communities navigating them.
Sharpening the question · The Netherlands
"Science fulfills its purpose when people can understand it."
After my PhD, I found myself working in a very different setting, coordinating research data for large-scale cancer studies at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. High-tech, well-resourced, and methodologically sophisticated. The contrast between this work and my connection to Syria, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and the global south in general was not lost on me, especially with the current atmosphere of isolationism, funding cuts, and retreat from international commitments to solidarity and equity.
Proximity to the most advanced research only sharpened the question of who it reaches. We were refining tools that most of the world could not yet access, while the tools that already work remain out of reach for too many. Working with biologists, pathologists, clinicians, data scientists, and bioinformaticians taught me that translating knowledge is a key form of expertise today. It confirmed that my interests lie in systems, communities, and the spaces between disciplines, at the intersection of research, practice, and policy.
Portfolio
Research & project work
Fifteen years of work across four interconnected research themes. Filter by theme, geography, or method.
Health in crisis
How do health systems survive — and strengthen — under conflict, displacement, and collapse?
Primary care & health system strengthening
What enables continuous, equitable care for people with chronic conditions in under-resourced settings?
Learning health systems
How do health systems generate knowledge from practice — and actually use it to improve?
Co-production & transdisciplinary knowledge
How should knowledge about complex health systems be produced — who is involved, and how does it travel?
Designed and implemented a disease surveillance system under active conflict — protocols, training, NGO coordination — in one month. Detected the first polio case post-conflict.
Strengthened national disease monitoring for Syrian refugee populations, supporting outbreak readiness and surveillance system scale-up with the Jordanian Ministry of Health.
Managed primary healthcare clinics for Syrian refugees and host communities — staffing, budgets, legal registration, M&E systems, and donor reporting.
PhD research using a realist mixed-methods design, co-developed tools with local partners, and conducted fieldwork across Hue and Hanoi. Findings taken up by district health leadership.
Secondary analysis of MSF programmatic data revealing a high burden of chronic disease in children in NE Syria. Contributed to programme design and a peer-reviewed publication.
Joined a USAID-funded TB programme in its final year to improve data quality and develop a cross-country learning system for programme closure and funder reporting.
Coordinated data governance for colorectal cancer trials (mtFIT, MOCCAS). Implemented FAIR principles and OMOP-CDM. Published in The Lancet Oncology and Gastroenterology.
Co-authored a conceptual paper on integrating qualitative research within epidemiological causal inference frameworks. Published in Annals of Epidemiology.
A personal essay on displacement, the politics of memory, and what it means to carry a country inside you while building a life elsewhere. Written for a general audience.
Services
How I can work with you
Strategic, evidence-based consulting for organisations working in health implementation, research, and policy.
Study design, mixed-methods frameworks, implementation research, evidence synthesis, realist evaluation, participatory co-design.
PHC service design, outbreak response systems, surveillance, programme evaluation in fragile and post-conflict contexts.
Technical briefs, policy translation, stakeholder engagement, and advocacy support. Translating complex findings into accessible formats decision-makers can use.
Curriculum design, research supervision, training delivery for field staff, graduate students, and NGO professionals.
FAIR principles, data management planning, M+E system design, cross-site harmonisation — in service of programme and research goals.
"Not sure what you need?"
Start with a conversation →Contact
Open to research collaborations, consultancies, and academic positions.
Global health, implementation science, and health system strengthening — especially in fragile, transitional, or under-resourced contexts.
"The work is better when it's built together."