Dr. Assem Al Hajj (FACS)

• The number of patients has been steadily increasing over the past few years which demonstrate that Clemenceau Medical Center has grown into an attractive medical facility in Lebanon and in the region. As the result of higher volumes and the increased patient case mix, we have started to organize our overall research activities. More specifically regarding my own area of expertise, I have started organizing and prospectively collecting information from the medical records on CMC patients with breast and endocrine conditions.
• Within the coming few years, I’m expecting to have published on multiple topics in breast surgery including our rates of re-excision in partial mastectomies, the prevalence of breast cancer in young patients in the Lebanese society and time-to-surgery for patients presenting from regional areas for treatment at our institution. As for my thyroid practice, we have been noting an increase in the prevalence of papillary carcinoma in younger patients that we will be reporting on in the near future.
• One ongoing computational pathology study involves the collaboration among the Johns Hopkins Bayview Breast cancer, Johns Hopkins School of Engineering and CMC. I am involved directly in the study, working both with the Hopkins team and my colleague, Dr. Selim Nasser, Chair of CMC pathology department. For the study we have selected 260 cases from the CMC database.

 Research Program Building / Leadership

• To help build our research program and facilitate our future endocrinology projects and publications, we encouraged and supported one of our young and enthusiastic faculty, Dr. Maya Barake, to complete a Master of Science in Health Research at the American University of Beirut in 2016. Dr. Barake initially joined CMC in 2013 after completing a fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Plans are in place to analyze our thyroid and parathyroid database. Dr. Barake has a very busy practice and is well versed in biostatistics and principles of performing clinical research.
• I have started establishing the necessary infrastructure and scientific teams after we identified our clinical research interests and strengths now that we have the clinical load and momentum to publish our data.