Samia Khoury
Department of Neurology, American University of Beirut Medical Center, Lebanon
Dr. Khoury is currently the Associate Dean for Clinical and Translational Research at the American University of Beirut. Since October 2011, she has served as the Director of the Abu Haidar Neuroscience Institute, and the Director of the new AUBMC Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Center at AUBMC in Beirut, the first MS center in the region. She is a professor of neurology at the American University of Beirut. From 2009-2013 she was the Jack, Sadie, and David Breakstone professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and served as the co-Director of the Partners Multiple Sclerosis Center, Boston since 2001. In 2007, Dr. Khoury was awarded the prestigious Kuwait Prize for Sciences by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences for her work in immunology.
Dr. Khoury received her Medical Diploma from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, in 1984 having been elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society in 1983. She completed her neurology residency at the Case Western Reserve University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio and her fellowship at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for Neurologic Diseases.
My major area of research is focused on understanding pathogenesis and mechanism of regulation/tolerance in Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis (EAE), the animal model for Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and the molecular mechanisms involving the cross talk between the immune system and neural stem cells during EAE. I am also investigating biomarkers of disease activity in humans with MS. My laboratory conducts basic and translational clinical research in MS. The basic research in EAE led to implementation of clinical trials in MS addressing the mechanisms of tolerance through costimulatory signal blockade and immune modulation by manipulation of cytokine pathways. This research can be considered truly translational since it impacts clinical care.
