Lebanese American University: 200 Years of Education, Now Building a Pharmaceutical Research Hub for the Middle East

The Lebanese American University (LAU) has spent nearly two centuries building one of the region's most internationally connected academic institutions, with US accreditation, three campuses, and graduates who match seamlessly into medical, pharmaceutical, and engineering careers worldwide. Under President Dr. Chaouki Abdallah, the university is doubling down on applied research, industry partnerships, and entrepreneurship — all while operating in one of the world's most challenging economic and political environments. From a new pharmaceutical research centre to a thriving industrial hub linking Lebanese expertise with global companies, LAU is demonstrating how a focused university can deliver outsized impact for its country and region.

Innovation Report: Tell us about LAU's history and its role in Lebanon today.

Dr. Chaouki Abdallah: LAU has been in Lebanon for more than 200 years. It started as a small school for girls in 1835 and became a full university for women in 1924. It was later known as Beirut College for Women, then Beirut University College, and eventually became co-educational and was renamed the Lebanese American University. Today we are a full-fledged university spanning everything from liberal arts to professional schools such as engineering, medicine, and pharmacy. We have around 10,000 students and roughly 350 faculty, with three campuses: Beirut and Byblos in Lebanon, and one in New York licensed to grant degrees.

Universities should be anchor institutions — not just in a place, but for the place. We take that very seriously. In Lebanon, we operate in a fragile environment, so we are an anchor institution within a fragile context, like many of our sister universities. We educate our students to global standards, but we also create public value locally through healthcare, research, entrepreneurship, and policy engagement. We cannot only be a classroom enterprise. In the US and the UK, people are asking what universities are for. That is not a question for us — we know what the university is for.

I see LAU as having three roles. We are a lighthouse — of truth, of beauty, of discovery — guiding people to earn a degree and explore new ideas. We are also a stabilizer of society and what I call a hope factory. Many of our students come here with a dream, and they leave not only with a degree but with a good job or a place in graduate school. We provide hope for that generation and their families, because otherwise many of them either could not study abroad or would not attend university at all, and they would risk being marginalized. We produce talent, and we are doubling down on translating knowledge into practical solutions — through the industrial hub, through our hospitals, and through applied research. We preserve and develop human capital while the country is under enormous strain, and we build bridges between the classroom and real-world applications through partnerships with industry and government. We also maintain and strengthen our connection to the international academic community. We are US-accredited; most of our programs are accredited in the US, some in Europe. Our degrees are trusted and portable. Our medical doctors apply and match for training and internships in the US. Our pharmacists take the US board exam and move seamlessly into the workforce. Our engineers continue their PhDs or work elsewhere around the world.

Innovation Report: Lebanon is a country of tremendous potential. What do you currently see as the biggest barriers to developing higher education and research, and what steps can LAU take to address them?

Dr. Chaouki Abdallah: Our biggest structural barrier is systemic, prolonged uncertainty. We have learned to operate under uncertain times, and in some ways we have turned it to our advantage — I like to say we have become antifragile. As long as the university is not closed, and we have never closed, we learn from each crisis and become more adept. I do not want to keep working like this, but we have made ourselves more robust to whatever uncertainty comes next. When COVID hit, many institutions were not prepared because they lacked the infrastructure or the expertise to deliver education online. Lebanon, after 30 or 40 years of prolonged uncertainty with intermittent stable periods, was able to switch to online delivery within days.

Another challenge is talent out-migration and the difficulty of planning research and academic growth over a long horizon. We react very quickly, and we are getting better at building longer-term plans. We need continuity of funding, of teams, of infrastructure, and of confidence. We protect access for students through financial aid and institutional resilience. Fortunately, my predecessors built up an endowment that we drew on heavily during the recent economic collapse to support our students. We invest selectively in research and applied partnerships — not in topics that are fashionable elsewhere, but in areas relevant to our context. We work with international institutions and Lebanese companies on issues like water, environmental challenges, fire suppression, and policy. I draw on my own global academic and professional networks, including Georgia Tech, where I spent my last years in the US, to connect our faculty and students with peers in Europe, the Gulf, and the wider Middle East.

We are not waiting for ideal conditions. Other universities operating under more comfortable circumstances are sometimes shocked by what we manage, but we are designing for constrained conditions and we are still affecting the country. The real challenge is not a lack of talent — it is the difficulty of converting that talent into durable programs and durable institutions. When the situation finally resolves, we want to be there first, strong enough to take full advantage. At one point more than 40% of our students were international; today we are at about 14%. Recovering that international share would allow us to do far more, especially given that a large portion of the local population cannot afford to attend without financial aid.

Innovation Report: Are international partners surprised by what you manage to achieve under such strain?

Dr. Chaouki Abdallah: I just returned from the US, where we received our reaccreditation from NECHE, the same body that accredits Harvard and many other major New England universities. They came and visited a few months ago. This is the third time we have gone through it, after almost 30 years of accreditation. They were impressed by what they like to call resilience. I try to avoid that word, because resilience can mean you survived but at a lower level. We are not only maintaining — we sometimes learn from a crisis and turn it into an advantage. We keep adding competitive programs, and our enrollment has been growing 3 to 4% a year despite all the challenges. That impressed the accrediting body.

Our external collaborators are surprised on two levels. First, when I tell them we are still teaching, doing research, and running our hospitals, they are sometimes shocked — they assume we are closed. Second, they recruit our students, who perform extremely well abroad. Our pharmacists are at one of only two universities in the world — including all American universities — whose graduates pass the US pharmacy board exam at 100% on the first attempt. So either we are doing something right or our students are exceptionally smart. I am not sure which.

Innovation Report: Where does research fit within LAU's identity, and can the experience you gained growing research expenditure at Georgia Tech be applied here?

Dr. Chaouki Abdallah: LAU is not a research powerhouse in the conventional sense, and many strong universities outside the US — including in the UK — are not either. But we do have a strong research identity. At Georgia Tech, scale was our advantage. I used to say Georgia Tech does excellence at scale; at LAU, focus is our advantage. There is a movement in the US and elsewhere called frugal science and engineering — solving genuinely important problems with very inexpensive solutions. A water-purification straw that costs a few dollars. A hearing aid that costs a buck or two and can be replaced often, instead of a $1,000 device. We did not invent this approach, but it is now widely respected, and it suits us well.

One thing I learned at Georgia Tech is that research grows when it is made central to institutional identity. It cannot be peripheral. That requires leadership attention, clear priorities, and partnerships. We partner with an institution in Cyprus on fire research, with a French institution on Mediterranean issues, and with Georgia Tech on entrepreneurship. Excellence and relevance should not be in competition. The best research is deeply fundamental yet still connected to real human and local needs. We do not have government research funding in Lebanon, so our research is funded from our own resources, the European Union, the US, or industry.

I am not transplanting Georgia Tech here — I could not do that even in London; the scale and the interests are completely different. We want to be a credible, useful, and distinctive partner in selected areas, and we want to multiply our capacity rather than chase recognition that does not matter. I tell our researchers to focus on quality and relevance, and the rankings will follow. Being number one in something does not make anyone richer, happier, or safer. I am not against fundamental work — fundamental problems can be deeply relevant. I just do not want to maximize an output that makes no difference. You can spend ten years and publish two papers that are the best in their field, or you can solve an immediate problem that saves lives. Both can matter equally. Chasing metrics that do not matter is the wrong reward system for research. We have a genetics research programme here that is identifying diseases — and cures — that are highly relevant to small villages in Lebanon but also to populations in the GCC, India, and beyond, where rare genetic diseases cluster in pockets.

Innovation Report: You have stressed the importance of partnerships. What are the building blocks of a successful partnership for a university like LAU?

Dr. Chaouki Abdallah: I will use a phrase I was told at Georgia Tech by the vice president for partnerships at a major laboratory: "I partner with universities that can scratch an itch I have." There has to be a real pain point, and both partners have to benefit. For companies that work with us through the industrial hub, we offer expertise, agility, and cost. They could probably find that expertise elsewhere, but we connect quickly through personal or professional channels — not through governments — and we deliver. These range from small firms of 50 to 100 people up to large companies in the tens of thousands. BMW has had a design studio with us in Lebanon and is very happy with our students and graduates, some of whom they hire and move to other locations. CVS in the US works with us on the pharmaceutical side. For a contract of around $100,000, we can solve problems that would cost ten times that amount in the US.

Innovation Report: The industrial hub is positioned as a bridge between academia and industry — a connection that is notoriously difficult to make work anywhere in the world. Tell us about your approach.

Dr. Chaouki Abdallah: You are right — university-industry collaboration is often personality-dependent and fragile. In the US, academic culture was built around long federal grants where the research outcome was rarely on the critical path of a product. Georgia Tech was different because it has had an applied research institute, GTRI (Georgia Tech Research Institute), for a long time, mostly solving problems for the Department of Defense. As executive vice president for research, one of my biggest tasks was lowering the barriers to that interaction — handling intellectual property, bringing industry to the table, and getting faculty to engage with industry on problems rather than just tools. There is an international organization called the University Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP) that focuses on exactly this. I am going to a UIDP meeting at UCL in London this June or July to discuss how to facilitate sabbaticals between industry and academia and how to translate knowledge in both directions.

At LAU, the industrial hub is one leg of a stool we call Business Development and Global Affairs. The hub sources and solves problems for industry. A company connects with us, we visit them — in Lebanon, the US, or elsewhere — we define the problem, and for a fixed price and a fixed period we solve it. The problem could be a piece of software, a process, a manufacturing issue, or a robot. We have a very practical faculty member leading it — a tinkerer himself — who runs teams of professors and students on around 15 to 20 projects at any given time.

The second leg is continuing education, training people outside the university in AI, management, and specific technologies, from frontline workers all the way to the C-suite. The third leg is the LAU Engine, which helps us spin out companies through entrepreneurship and startup support. We had earlier collaboration with Georgia Tech on this and we are now scaling it up significantly with them. The fourth leg is a consulting arm that operates much like a traditional consulting firm, helping organizations restructure or work through specific challenges. Three of these four generate resources and revenue. The startup arm does not — it is an investment, just as it was at Georgia Tech.

The same is true of research more broadly. Many people assume research is free money. It is not. Even at institutions like Georgia Tech, research does not bring in more than it costs. Research is done because it trains people to think differently, creates inventions and solutions, and helps pay for education — but it does not cover everything. The real outcomes are drugs, products, or companies that grow and contribute later. There is no positive short-term financial return on research. It is about answering big questions, solving real problems, and helping society.

Innovation Report: Please share an example of one of the flagship projects coming out of LAU that you most want an international audience to know about.

Dr. Chaouki Abdallah: I want to highlight the Pharmaceutical and Medical Research Center, the PMRC. We broke ground in September 2024 and we will finish by the end of this year. Lebanon imports the vast majority of its medicines, and brand-name drugs are very expensive. The PMRC will be a bioequivalence center — it will test and develop generic medications composed of the same active ingredients with the same efficacy as brand-name versions. We are partnering with the pharmaceutical and medical industries in Lebanon and internationally to do this. We also received a significant donation from a donor specifically to support research in this area, separate from the construction.

This will be highly impactful. It will be the first centre of its kind in Lebanon, and I believe only the third in the Middle East — the other two are in Jordan. By certifying generics domestically, we will accelerate availability and reduce costs in Lebanon, and we will position LAU and Lebanon as a regional centre for pharmaceutical science, including a CRO function serving the Gulf and beyond.