AUB North American Alumni Conference: An Ode to AUB

Fall 2022

The October 2022 alumni weekend in Boston, Massachusetts, became an ode sung in many different voices to the excellence of AUB. Over the three days, more than 200 guests attended from 16 states plus Canada. Three panel discussions focused on topics in medicine made clear that the AUB alumni community occupies an outsized place in the medical world in North America.

Dr. Raymond Sawaya arrived from Beirut one year to the day after beginning his job as the Raja N. Khuri Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and vice president for medical affairs at AUB. He brought news of the AUB Medical Center to many in the audience who had attended AUB, ranging from over forty years ago to just recently.

“The AUB medical faculty and staff have extraordinary commitment to their work,” Sawaya reported, “and the state of affairs is better than we could have expected.” He cited the results of a recent survey in which 75 percent of the medical faculty and staff said their financial situation had improved in the last year, and 60 percent cited enhanced morale. “And in further news, we have had a record number of applications to the medical school this year.”

Dr. Kamal Badr, AUB’s executive associate dean for medical education, proudly showed how AUB students measure up against their counterparts in the US in average five-year cumulative subject scores, with AUB students outranking students in the US in five of the seven categories. When he asked how many in the room had attended AUB’s medical school, hands shot up throughout the audience.

The panelists, a mix of AUB and outside experts, discussed the fields of disaster preparedness, medical education, and mental health. Dr. Barbara Cockrill, associate dean for faculty development at Harvard Medical School, noted her surprise at learning that morning that three of her colleagues in the pulmonary care unit at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital are AUB graduates.

Dr. Daniel Hashimoto, professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania and vice chair and cofounder of the Global Surgical AI Collaborative, talked about the increased benefits of AI in training medical students. He also mentioned noticing someone on Twitter doing interesting work in AI. It turned out to be Dr. Cyril Zakka, who at the time was at AUB and is now at Stanford University.

Honorable guest Dr. P. Roy Vagelos, past chairman of the American pharmaceutical company Merck & Co., brought his wife of 67 years, Diana, to the panel discussions, sat in the front row, and stayed throughout, jotting down notes, engaging with the speakers afterward, and making himself available to young alumni. At lunch he gave an address detailing his journey in biochemistry, which started almost 70 years ago and included getting drugs developed and distributed for free by Merck & Co., saving the eyesight of millions of people at risk of river blindness in the savannah areas of West Africa. He ended his talk with a message for the young medical professionals in the room, expressing that in his opinion cancers that remain resistant to treatment will come under control. Because of advances in medicine, he said that the time ahead in their careers will be enormously exciting. “As far as patient care goes, you will be able to do things that will be unbelievable,” he says.

During the gala dinner that evening, AUB President Fadlo R. Khuri, accompanied by Board Chairman Philip S. Khoury and Trustee Huda Zoghbi, awarded Dr. Vagelos the AUB Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters in the first such ceremony to be held off campus. Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of pediatrics and molecular virology & microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, was the keynote speaker for the evening and hailed Dr. Vagelos as a hero before detailing the advances in vaccines that have built on the work of Vagelos and his colleagues.

The evening gala was emceed by Deborah Amos, Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence at Princeton University. She was known to many in the room as a trusted voice on National Public Radio (NPR) who has covered the Middle East, in particular refugees, for decades. She wove tales about her time reporting from Beirut, discovering the beauty of the AUB campus as well as knowledgeable sources for her reporting.

The evening gave way to AUB alumnus Bassel Naaman (BA ’10), otherwise known as DJ Base, who got the crowd dancing and kept them on the floor until midnight. “We had a stellar program,” says Lina Jazi, associate vice president for alumni relations, “and the WAAAUB New England Chapter led by Salim Chahine worked overtime to make sure it went according to plan. All we needed was the energy, loyalty, and passion of the alumni, who turned out in full and put it over the top.”