Executive Committee
Atif Kubursi, Ph.D. --- President
Atif Kubursi is Emeritus Professor of Economics at McMaster University, Canada. He taught economics at Purdue University in Indiana, USA, was visiting Scholar at Cambridge University and served as the Acting Executive Secretary, and Undersecretary General, of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. He authored 12 books including The Economic Consequences of the Camp David Accords (Institute of Palestine Studies) and Oil, Industrialization & Development in Arab Gulf States (Routledge), Food and Water Security in the Arab World (World Bank) and over 250 papers in academic and professional journals and technical reports. He holds a B.A. in economics from the American University of Beirut, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Purdue University, USA.
Hani Faris, Ph.D. --- Secretary
Hani A. Faris is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Faculty Associate in the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia. He served on the faculty of various academic institutions including the Political Science Department at Kuwait University; the School of International Service at the American University in Washington, D.C.; the Centre for Middle East Studies at Harvard University; the Department of Political Science & the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University; and the History Department at Simon Fraser University.
Among the books Dr. Faris has authored, co-authored and edited are Sectarian Conflict in the Modern History of Lebanon (1980); Beyond the Lebanese Civil War (1982); US Policy in the Middle East (1984); The Arab Position on the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon (1983); Arab Nationalism and the Future of the Arab World (1987); The One State Solution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Country for All its Citizens (2011) and Failure of the Two-State Solution: The Prospects of One State in the Israel-Palestine Conflict (2013). He has written more than 50 book chapters & articles in professional journals on such topics as Arab politics, Arab nationalism, the Middle East in world politics, Lebanese politics & institutions, history of the Palestinian issue, Zionism, and Third World development. He appeared on national, provincial, and local T.V. and radio programs in Canada, U.S.A., U.K., France, Lebanon, Kuwait, & the United Arab Emirates & was interviewed or quoted in the New York Times, Financial Post of Canada, and a large number of Middle Eastern newspapers and magazines.
Dr. Faris has served as Assistant Director General of the Palestine Research Center (1967–1968); Academic Vice Dean for Graduate Studies at Kuwait University (1978–1981); President of the Association of Arab–American University Graduates (1984–1985); advisor to the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security (1989–1991); member of the Board of Editors of Arab Studies Quarterly (1987–1990), member of the Board of Editors of Contemporary Arab Affairs (2008-2017), Policy advisor to the Palestinian Policy Network Al-Shabaka (2010-Present) and Memeber (2000-Present) and President (2007-2013) of the Board of Directors of Trans Arab Research Institute.
John Makhoul, Ph.D. --- Treasurer
John Makhoul is a Chief Scientist at BBN Technologies, where he has been working on various aspects of speech and language processing, including automatic speech recognition, optical character recognition, human-machine interaction using voice, and machine translation. He is also Adjunct Professor at Northeastern University where he supervises graduate students doing their graduate thesis work at BBN. He is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, and the recipient of a number of awards from the IEEE, including the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing award and medal, the highest presented in that field. Dr. Makhoul has served as President of the Association of Arab American University Graduates and has served on the Board of the Alumni Association of the American University of Beirut (AUB). Currently he serves on several advisory boards, including the External Advisory Committee of the AUB Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Makhoul was born in Deirmimas, Lebanon, and has degrees from the American University of Beirut (B.E., 1964), the Ohio State University (M.Sc., 1965), and M.I.T. (PhD, 1970), all in electrical engineering.
Members at Large
Ibrahim N. Hajj, Ph.D.
Ibrahim N. Hajj is currently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before retiring, he served as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Research Professor at both the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Beckman Institute. Prior to joining Illinois, he was at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
From 2000 to 2010, Dr. Hajj served as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture (FEA) at AUB (now the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture). As Dean, Dr. Hajj spearheaded major academic and institutional reforms. He restructured all programs, recruited new young faculty members, created new programs in Chemical Engineering, Energy, and Bioengineering. New Ph.D. programs were established across all engineering departments. New buildings were constructed, and existing facilities renovated.
Dr. Hajj is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Part II: Analog and Digital Signal Processing and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine. He also served on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, receiving its Golden Jubilee Medal in 1999. He has received multiple best paper awards.
Dr. Hajj received the B.E. degree from the American University of Beirut (AUB), Beirut, Lebanon, the M.S. degree from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, all in electrical engineering.
Munir Jirmanus, Ph.D.
Munir Jirmanus was born in Jerusalem to parents who had immigrated to Palestine from Lebanon. In 1948 his Christian parents lost their house & land because they were not Jewish, and ended up going to Lebanon to start a new life. Munir graduated from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 1964 with a B.S. in Physics, and with an M.S. in Theoretical Physics from Tufts University in 1966. He subsequently went back to Lebanon and taught at the Lebanese University, then came back to Tufts where he received a Ph.D. in Experimental Physics in 1973. After brief teaching stints at Tufts University and AUB, he joined Janis Research Company, one of the world leaders in designing & supplying cryogenic equipment to the Low Temperature Physics research community. He was the Vice President and Technical Director responsible for developing new products for Laboratory Cryogenics at Janis. He is currently “employed” in a full time child care position for his four grandchildren. He has two daughters who were born and educated in public schools and private universities in Massachusetts, and they both have very strong connections to Lebanon & Palestine. Munir & his wife have a long history of involvement in Peace & Justice issues in the Arab American community in Boston, first as students and subsequently after they returned to Boston in 1978. They organized several local & regional educational conferences for the Presbyterian Church, USA, along with two SABEEL conferences in Boston, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, about Palestine / Israel. More recently he served as chair of the Medford Human Rights Commission and is a member of Massachusetts Peace Action, the Boston Alliance for Water Justice, the local BDS movement and works closely with Jewish Voice for Peace in Boston.
Rabab Kreidieh Ward, Ph.D.
Dr. Rabab Kreidieh Ward has been a professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada, since 1979, and is presently professor emeritus there. Her career includes a series of many firsts, particularly for women in engineering. She was the first woman to join the professional engineering society in her country of birth, Lebanon, and the second woman to earn a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UC, Berkeley (1972). She was the first woman appointed as lecturer in engineering in Zimbabwe (1975), and the first woman with a Ph.D. appointed as professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering in Canada (1981).
Rabab is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the IEEE and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. She is an International Member of the (USA) National Academy of Engineering and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the Lebanese American University (2024). She is also recipient of the highest award of the Association of Professional Engineers in B.C, Canada for significant technical contributions and leadership in engineering “that characterize the profession at its best”. She has also received the top “Career Achievement Award” of CUFA, the association representing all university professors in B.C. She was appointed to several national and international advisory boards, including the National Research Council of Canada and Qatar Foundation, and was active in establishing the Canadian Society for Women in Science and Technology (SCWIST) that has become a powerful force for women in Canada.
Dr. Ward is a leader in developing innovative techniques to a wide spectrum of engineering applications. These include cable TV, brain computer interfaces, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed omography (CT) and other biological and medical technologies. She has authored over 620 refereed papers and book chapters, which have been cited well over 26,000 times, and earned 12 best paper awards.
Salah Bibi, M.D.
I was born in Yaffa, Palestine in 1945 and, along with my family, was forcibly expelled during the 1948 Nakba. We first moved to Beirut, Lebanon, and later to Alexandria, Egypt, due to family business needs. In Alexandria, I attended Victoria College until the age of eleven. During my time in Egypt, I had the privilege of meeting leaders such as Jamal Abdul Nasser, Abdul Hakim Amer, and Mohammad Najib, experiences that deeply shaped my thinking and inspired a lifelong commitment to Pan-Arab nationalism and service to my community.
I went on to graduate high school from International College (IC), my father’s alma mater. From there I went on to the American University of Beirut (AUB) with degrees in Biology and Medicine. During my three-year medical residency, I volunteered part-time to care for patients in Palestinian refugee camps and underserved Lebanese areas such as the Bekaa and Akkar Valley, experiences that strengthened my dedication to improving healthcare access for vulnerable populations.
I later pursued advanced studies in Infectious Diseases at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. For the next 40 years, I practiced infectious disease medicine at Gould Medical Foundation in Modesto, California. My career also included five years as CEO of an Independent Practice Association (IPA), and three decades focused on hospital cost containment and clinical research, including phase II and III trials of medications to combat infectious diseases.
Beyond my clinical work, I have served on multiple boards, including the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), Stanislaus Medical Society, AllCare Medical Insurance, Sutter Memorial Hospital, and Stanislaus Surgical Hospital. These roles allowed me to combine my medical expertise with leadership and strategic planning to improve patient care systems.
My greatest strengths lie in motivation, leadership, and innovation in patient care. Drawing from both my personal history as a Palestinian refugee and my professional experience, I am deeply committed to advancing the health and well-being of the Palestinian and Lebanese people. Serving on this board would allow me to honor my roots while leveraging my decades of medical expertise to help provide life altering care to those who need it most.