Dr. Cybel Mehawej

Dr. Cybel Mehawej is an Associate Professor of Genetics at the Gilbert and Rose-Marie Chagoury School of Medicine at the Lebanese American University. Dr Mehawej earned her PhD in genetics from Paris Descartes University in 2013. She subsequently pursued a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Immunogenetics at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School where her research focused on uncovering the molecular bases of Primary Immunodeficiency Diseases. Dr. Mehawej’s research interests lie in linking genes to new phenotypes and in elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying genetic diseases. In 2017, she was appointed Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Medicine at USJ where she played a pivotal role in introducing TREC based neonatal screening for severe combined immunodeficiencies and T-cell lymphopenia in Lebanon. In 2020, Dr Mehawej joined the Lebanese American University as an Assistant Professor, in the newly established Department of Human Genetics at the Gilbert and Rose-Marie Chagoury School of Medicine. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2024.

Dr. Mehawej has built a strong and focused scholarly record yielding over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and contributing to the discovery of several disease-causing genes. She is a frequent presenter at international scientific conferences and has received multiple honors for her contributions to the field, including the Excellence Award from the “Franco-Lebanese Medical Association” in 2012, the Resource-limited country award from the “American Society of Human Genetics” (ASHG 2023), and the “LAU Faculty Research Excellence Award 2024”. In 2023, she was recognized as one of the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Levant Young Talents, acknowledging her achievements in scientific research and her role as a leader in the field.