Dear members of the AUB community,
It gives me great pleasure to announce the appointment of Dr. Elie Akl as Vice Provost for Research, effective September 1, 2024. This appointment is the outcome of an international search, and I wish to thank the search committee members, faculty and staff from across campus, for their hard work reviewing a strong cohort of internal and external candidates for this strategic position.
Vice Provost Akl will lead the establishment of the Office of Research at AUB to upgrade our support services to faculty members and researchers, expand extramural grant opportunities and partnerships with funding agencies and foundations, enhance the translation and visibility of faculty research output, and drive forward our multi-disciplinary research and creative work enterprise.
Dr. Akl is an outstanding researcher with a proven record of academic leadership. His areas of interest include evidence synthesis, practice guidelines, and conflicts of interest in health research and medical practice. He has over 500 peer-reviewed publications and has been listed by Clarivate as a Highly Cited Researcher every year since 2015, which places him amongst the top 0.1% most cited scientists worldwide. He has been recognized internationally through memberships on the executive committee of the GRADE working group, the board of trustees of the Guidelines International Network (GIN), as well as the WHO Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Evaluation and the WHO Advisory Panel on International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP).
Dr. Akl earned his MD at Université Saint Joseph in 1999. He then completed a Master of Public Health (MPH) and a PhD in Epidemiology and Community Health at SUNY Buffalo, in 2004 and 2008, respectively. In 2012, he joined AUB's Department of Internal Medicine, where he founded the division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics in 2017 and is now a tenured professor. From 2015 to 2022, Dr. Akl was also the director of the Clinical Research Institute (CRI) at AUB, where he founded the AUB GRADE center and the Clinical Epidemiology Unit (CEU). He has been serving as Associate Dean for Clinical Research at the Faculty of Medicine (FM) since 2022.
As director of CRI, Dr. Akl expanded the institute's research services to support faculty members in identifying and seeking grant opportunities and conducting clinical trials. He also introduced online and hybrid educational offerings in addition to new capacity building programs including the Faculty Advancement Program for junior faculty members at FM, Nursing Development Program for practicing nurses at AUBMC, Research Personnel Program for research assistants and fellows. As Associate Dean for Clinical Research, he has been overseeing initiatives to enrich the research environment at FM/AUBMC and broaden the collaboration between the Faculty of Medicine and other faculties/schools at AUB, other Lebanese medical schools, the Ministry of Public Health, the National Council for Scientific Research in Lebanon (CNRS-L), and institutions in the region and internationally.
Dr. Akl's pragmatic and data-driven leadership will be critical in elevating and expanding AUB's research ecosystem. He is a community-builder with a strong commitment to fostering relationships across departments, centers and institutes, as well as faculties and schools. I am confident that Dr. Akl will lead the newly established Office of Research with dynamism towards greater achievements. Please join me in welcoming him into this new and exciting role.
Sincerely,
Zaher Dawy, PhD
Provost