Dr. Josyann Abisaab is an attending physician in the Emergency Department at the New York Presbyterian Hospital and a faculty member of the Global Emergency Medicine Program at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her areas of interest include global health, complex humanitarian emergencies and refugee protection. She has conducted human rights research and advocacy in the Middle East and, in 2014, joined a team of Harvard FXB researchers on a rapid needs assessment project conducted in the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan. She is currently involved in a research initiative in Lebanon with a focus on primary health care access among host and refugee communities.
As lecturing faculty, Abisaab taught global health seminars about the Syrian refugee crisis at Cornell University and served as one of the lead organizers of a multidisciplinary conference organized by the Cornell University Law School, on the refugee crisis in the Middle East. The conference, Beyond Survival: Livelihood Strategies for Refugees in the Middle East, engaged academics and practitioners in an exploration of strategies to improve refugees’ access to education, health care and work. Abisaab completed her internal medicine residency at the New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center, earned her MD from the Rochester School of Medicine and holds a BS from the American University of Beirut.