Dr. Joseph Stephan

Faculty

Dr. Joseph Stephan is Director of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and Research Ethical Compliance at the Lebanese American University (LAU), where he also serves as Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the Gilbert and Rose-Marie Chagoury School of Medicine. In this capacity, Dr. Stephan oversees ethical compliance for both human and animal research across the university. This includes management of the LAU Animal Facility and coordination of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), ensuring alignment with institutional, national, and international guidelines for the responsible and humane use of animals in research.

A member of LAU’s IRB since 2016 and IRB Chair since 2019, Dr. Stephan has led the board through a strategic and demanding transition during the COVID-19 pandemic, strengthening infrastructure for ethical human subject research while supporting the shift to virtual operations. He continues to spearhead efforts to uphold participant safety, regulatory compliance, and efficient review processes across LAU and its affiliated medical centers.

At the institutional level, Dr. Stephan plays a central role within the Graduate Studies and Research (GSR) office in guiding faculty through IRB and animal study protocols. His efforts ensure LAU’s research enterprise aligns with both local regulatory frameworks and international best practices. He manages LAU’s subscription to CITI, ensuring faculty and student training in responsible and ethical conduct of research, and offers university-wide orientation sessions on IRB processes and the ethics of research.

Dr. Stephan earned his Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from The Ohio State University in 2008, where he investigated autophagy and cell survival pathways. He subsequently joined the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel at Columbia University as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellow (2008–2015), studying the molecular and biochemical basis of long-term memory formation.

An accomplished researcher, Dr. Stephan’s work has been published in leading scientific journals and remains widely cited. He has represented LAU at national workshops on the ethics of human subject research organized by the Lebanese National Consultative Committee on Ethics (CCNLE) and UNESCO, and at the launch of the Lebanese Clinical Trial Registry (LCTR) by the Ministry of Public Health—a WHO primary registry.