News Highlights
Author:
Ada H. Porter,
Director of Communications,
NY Office,
porter@aub.edu.lb
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AUB appoints Mohamed H. Sayegh, MD, as vice-president and dean of the Faculty of Medicine
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American University of Beirut President Peter F. Dorman announced today that Mohamed H. Sayegh, MD of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts has been selected as the University's next vice president for Medical Affairs and Raja N. Khuri dean of the Faculty of Medicine and the AUB Medical Center (AUBMC). Dr. Sayegh is a Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics and holds the Warren E. Grupe and John P. Merrill Chair in Transplantation Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is also the Director of the Schuster Family Transplantation Research Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Children's Hospital Boston. Dr. Sayegh will assume responsibilities from Dr. Nadim Cortas, the current vice president and dean of the Faculty of Medicine, on July 1, 2009.
"Under Dr. Cortas' leadership, the Faculty of Medicine and the AUB Medical Center have made great strides in the last decade, with solid advances in our international programmatic ties and with important capital improvements to the medical center. Dr. Cortas and his team have also succeeded in establishing both a financial structure and a system of critical self-assessment for improved hospital performance based on best practices. I am confident that, with Dr. Mohamed Sayegh at the helm, the Faculty of Medicine and AUBMC will continue to develop, setting new standards for medical care, education, and research in the region, as he is a distinguished physician and academician, a gifted administrator, and a brilliant researcher in the field of transplantation medicine," said President Dorman.
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Mohamed H. Sayegh received his medical degree with distinction from AUB in 1984, pursued his internship and residency at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and was a postdoctoral fellow in nephrology and transplant immunology at Brigham and Women's Hospital of Harvard Medical School in Boston. He has received the National Kidney Foundation Clinician Scientist Award and the American Society of Transplantation Young Scientist Award and Best Mentor Award. He is past president of the American Society of Transplantation.
Dr. Sayegh plans to return to live in Lebanon for the first time in 25 years. "This position provides a great opportunity for me to be able to come back to my home--both Beirut and AUB," said Sayegh. "I have a simple yet ambitious vision: to lead AUBMC to become the number one academic medical school and center in the region. The greatness of AUBMC is in its amazing faculty. The goal is to have outstanding faculty, nurses and staff provide the best care for our patients, teach the new generation of physicians and scientists in medicine, and be the leaders in cutting edge medicine and biomedical research in the whole region."
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Dr. Sayegh's research work in transplantation focuses on understanding the mechanisms of how the immune system rejects an organ transplant and on developing novel ways of fooling the immune system to accept the transplant without administering chronic immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection. This phenomenon, called immunologic tolerance, was first described in experimental animal models in 1953 by Sir Peter Medawar, a Noble Laureate of Lebanese origin. Dr. Sayegh is working on translating this seminal observation to human organ transplant recipients.
He first became interested in transplantation as a medical resident at the Cleveland Clinic. "At that time, I was interested in renal diseases as well as immunology, and began to get exposure to patients who had received transplants. For me, what was fascinating was working with these patients and seeing that, upon receiving a transplant, they did not have to depend on a dialysis machine for survival," says Sayegh. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. He has served on several committees of the National Institute of Health and other US and international organizations. He is the chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee and serves on the Board of Trustees of the Harvard Dubai Foundation for Medical Research.
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