Message from the Dean

Welcome to the Gilbert and Rose-Marie Chagoury School of Medicine at the Lebanese American University.

I am glad you have taken the time to learn more about us, whether you are considering applying, are already training with us, are weighing whether to join our faculty, or are simply curious about who we are.

We are a young school. We opened our doors in 2009, so we do not have a century of tradition to point to. What we do have, after less than two decades, is a growing number of graduates now practicing, teaching, and leading in hospitals, universities, and research centers in Lebanon and around the world. That track record, more than any tagline, is what speaks for us.

Our curriculum is built to change. Medicine does not hold still — new evidence, new technology, and new ways of thinking keep changing what physicians need to know and how they learn and practice, and a curriculum that cannot move with that pace becomes outdated in students’ hands before they graduate. So we treat ours as something to keep rebuilding: clinically integrated from the first year, open to simulation and new technology as they prove themselves useful, and revisited often rather than left to run on inertia. But the pace of change is exactly why we hold just as firmly to what does not change. Care, at its core, is a human relationship — between a physician and a patient, a teacher and a student, a colleague and a colleague. No matter how advanced our tools become, that relationship is the reason why we do this work. We want our students to be technically skilled, but never at the expense of care itself.

We look for that same balance in the people who join us, as students, residents, faculty, and staff. We value differences of background, training, and life experience, because medicine here is practiced amid real complexity, and physicians who have only ever encountered people like themselves are not prepared for it. We also value people who read beyond medicine — the humanities, the arts, the questions that don’t have clean answers — because that is where a physician’s judgment and sense of proportion tend to come from. And we value people who are curious about where the field is going and are not intimidated by it. Put simply: we want people who bring their full selves into a room, because that is what patients and colleagues deserve to receive back.

That is who we look for. It is also, already, who we have. Our greatest strength is our people. Our faculty trained and practiced across the region, Europe, and America before choosing to teach here, and they bring that breadth of expertise with them into every classroom and clinic. But what distinguishes them is not where they trained — it is what they have done with that training in this particular place, teaching and practicing through adversities that have tested this school and this country more than once in recent years, without ever lowering their standards because of it. Our students and residents learn medicine from people who have already been tested. That is a kind of expertise no transcript captures, and it is, in the end, the one that matters most.

If you are thinking about training with us, I want to be honest with you. I will not tell you that studying medicine here, or anywhere, is easy — it isn’t, and it would do you a disservice to pretend otherwise, especially in a country that asks a great deal of the people who choose to stay and build within it. What I can tell you is that if you train with us, you will be doing it alongside people who have chosen, again and again, to keep showing up for their patients, their students, and each other. I believe that is worth a great deal. I hope you will take the time to explore the rest of our website, and I look forward to welcoming you to our community.

Sincerely,

Sola Aoun Bahous, MD, PhD, MHPE
Professor of Medicine/Dean
Gilbert and Rose-Marie Chagoury School of Medicine
Lebanese American University