I am an epidemiologist with a medical background and 24 years of professional experience.
After graduating from medical school in 1996, I served in a remote rural health center in the Middle East. One of my challenges during my service was caring for patients with mild head injury (MHI). At the time, referring all MHI cases to the hospital was not possible as our health center had only one ambulance and the nearest hospital was three hours away. Therefore, by referring an unnecessary case, I could not refer any potentially ill patients for the next six hours. On the other hand, if a patient with MHI later developed signs or symptoms of intracranial hematoma, it would have been too late to refer the patient to the hospital.
While the decision was clear for severe cases, I needed to be very selective in referring MHI cases. I had to determine which MHI patient would truly benefit from the CT-scanning, and imaging could change their care process. To find a valid answer to this question, I enrolled in an MPH program with a focus on public health research, and later in a PhD program in epidemiology with a focus on bio-statistics and research methodology.
For my PhD dissertation, I developed a decision rule for CT scanning in MHI in remote areas with limited resources which was later published in the Journal of Neurosurgery. This led me to the academics for the rest of my career.
I love bio-statistics and have analyzed most of the papers I have coauthored. My current h-index is 36 according to Google Scholar and 24 according to the Scopus.
My research interests include educational research, clinical epidemiology, injury prevention, health care quality assessment, public health, and social determinants of health.