Dr. Joseph Stephan

Faculty

Dr. Joseph Stephan joined LAU’s Gilbert and Rose-Marie Chagoury’s School of Medicine as Assistant Professor of Biochemistry in Fall 2015, and is the current Biochemistry Discipline Coordinator. He has an extensive track-record of service on numerous school-level and university-wide committees. In Fall 2016, Dr. Stephan joined the IRB and has served as IRB Chair since February 2019, at a strategic juncture for the board with the urgency of the prevailing pandemic and the transition to online operations.  He has worked very closely with the IRB Office to foster a compliant infrastructure for human subject research, ensuring ethical compliance, participant safety, and a streamlined study review process. In his new role as Director, he will lead the LAU IRB in its oversight of research involving humans at LAU and LAU Medical Center Rizk Hospital (LAUMCRH), ensuring ethical compliance with research related policies and procedures. Dr Stephan will also play a key role within the GSR in ensuring abidance with local and international guidelines for the protection of humans and appropriate use of animals in research, as well as helping faculty members with their IRB and/or animal study applications. Dr. Stephan holds a Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (2008) from The Ohio State University, where he researched signaling pathways controlling cell growth and survival, including autophagy. He then joined Nobel-laureate Eric Kandel’s laboratory at Columbia University (2008-2015) as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellow and investigated the molecular and biochemical underpinnings of long-term memory storage. Dr. Stephan’s research is highly cited and featured in prestigious journals. He has represented LAU at national workshops on the Ethics of Research Involving Human Subjects organized by the Lebanese National Consultative Committee on Ethics (CCNLE) and UNESCO, and at the launching of the Lebanese Clinical Trial Registry (LCTR) by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, a primary registry under the World Health Organization.