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Prof. Monique Chaaya

Coordinator/Advisor of the MS Program in Epidemiology
Faculty of Health Sciences
American University of Beirut – Lebanon
 

Monique Chaaya, DrPH is Professor of Epidemiology at the Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS), American University of Beirut (AUB). Her main research interests focus on two priorities in public health, namely mental health and tobacco control. She conducted cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on mental health of vulnerable populations, specifically pregnant women, prisoners of war, displaced and older adults in underprivileged communities, and validated in Arabic five mental health scales such as the Arabic Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), the Arabic Perceived Stress Scale and A-RUDAS (Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale).

Her interest in mental health of older adults began in the year 2000 when she joined a multidisciplinary Urban Health Research Group and co-investigated a comprehensive survey of disadvantaged older persons’ health, a project implemented in 2002. In 2011, she received an R21 NIH grant to study prevalence of dementia in Lebanon. This study was done in collaboration with international researcher from Denmark and UK.

From this study, she was able so far to investigate the association between dementia and cardiovascular disease risk factors, the burden of care among family caregivers of older adults, the patterns and predictors of health care services utilization by elderly, and the association of dementia prevalence with lifestyle and diet-related factors. Building on the NIH grant, she developed a cohort study on dementia (COLDS) funded by the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research. The focus of this study is to determine the incidence of dementia and other health outcome measures including mortality, hospitalization and institutionalization.

Professor Chaaya graduated with a Doctorate of Public Health from the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins School of Public Heath in 1998 and was appointed as an Assistant Professor at AUB. Since 2002, she has been serving as the coordinator of the MS in Epidemiology program. Recently, she served for 6 years (from 2009 to 2015) as the chair of the Epidemiology and Population Health Department at the faculty of Health Sciences. She played a major role in developing the proposal for a PhD in Epidemiology program, and revising the MPH and the MS programs in Epidemiology and Population Health.

She also served as a committee chair/member for 34 MS students and four doctoral students. In the last 6 years, she has been involved in coordinating training program at King Abdullah International Medical Research Center (KAIMRC) and other academic units at the King Saud Abdul-Aziz University for Health Sciences (KSAU-HS) to build research capacity of junior medical/clinical researchers at KAIMRC.