Dr. Lara Jirmanus is primary care physician in the Family Medicine Department at the Cambridge Health Alliance. She has been involved in grassroots organizing, advocacy and research for many years, addressing worker and immigrant rights in the US, social movements and infectious diseases in Brazil and the impacts of conflict and displacement in the Middle East. Her current research focuses on the health of Syrian refugees and host populations in Lebanon, as well as the Dom, the Middle Eastern Roma. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, she completed a residency in family medicine at the Boston University Medical Center, a fellowship in Global Women’s Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and earned an MPH at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Jirmanus served as chief resident in Family Medicine at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon and taught a course in global health and social medicine at the American University of Beirut Medical School. During the 2016-2017 academic year she led an interdisciplinary seminar on the Syrian refugee crisis with the Harvard FXB Center and the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School.
She is currently engaged in a community-based participatory research project with Lebanese, Dom and Syrian refugee residents in an urban slum in Beirut, as well as a study of the quality of primary care in Lebanon.