Health Beyond Boundaries Cross-cultural Panel

View On-demand Recording

Wednesday, April 9, 2025, at 12:00 p.m. | Location: MUSC Wellness Center Auditorium / Broadcast Virtually

On April 9, MUSC panelists native to other countries around the world will share their experiences practicing research and delivering health care in their respective home countries and in the U.S. This roundtable discussion will feature discussion by panelists of their perspectives on how health is shaped in different contexts, challenges, barriers and strategies.

Continue reading to learn more about this year's panelists.

Panelists

Yosra Alkabab, M.D.

Assistant Professor, MUSC College of Medicine (Yemen)

Yosra Alkabab is an infectious diseases physician scientist with a focus on tuberculosis (TB) and other mycobacterial infections. Born and raised in Yemen, she pursued her medical education, including Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases training, in Saudi Arabia. Driven by a strong desire to contribute to clinical research in TB and infectious diseases of poverty, Dr. Alkabab was accepted into the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Infectious Diseases Research Pathway at the University of Virginia (UVA). After completing her fellowship, Dr. Alkabab joined the Medical University of South Carolina as an Assistant Professor of Medicine.

Her research focuses on the role of metabolic syndrome in TB treatment outcomes, including anti-TB pharmacokinetics. Her work has demonstrated that, for people with both diabetes and TB, personalized dosing of anti-TB medicine based on individual pharmacokinetics can accelerate the time to microbiological cure. She collaborates with colleagues at UVA and Kibong’oto Infectious Disease Hospital in Tanzania to better understand the bidirectional biological interactions between TB and metabolic disorders, such as diabetes, and develop novel strategies to address both diseases. She recently received a mentored career development K23 award from the US National Institutes of Health to pursue research in TB and metabolic disorders.

In addition to her research, she works as an attending infectious diseases physician with focus on transplant infectious diseases and management of people with infections due to nontuberculous mycobacteria.

Hermes Florez, M.D., Ph.D., MPH

Professor and Chair, Department of Public Health Sciences at MUSC College of Medicine (Venezuela)

Hermes Florez received his MD from the University of Zulia in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and his PhD and MPH from the University of Miami School of Medicine. Following his initial career as Professor of Public Health Sciences and Medicine at Miami, he recently joined MUSC as Chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at MUSC and as a member of the Endocrinology Medical Service at the Robert H. Johnson Veterans’ Administration Medical Center in Charleston.

As a public health physician-scientist with training in Endocrinology and Geriatrics, the primary goal of Dr. Florez’s research efforts is to reduce the burden of chronic diseases and promote healthier aging through the implementation of best practices for prevention and management. He has a current focus on diabetes and cardiovascular disease. He is the national and international leader of projects focused on the role of genetics, gene-environment interactions, fitness promotion and pharmacological interventions using oral hypoglycemic agents in determining outcome in pre-diabetes and diabetes care. His studies in the VA system and in Latin America have been funded by the Pan American Health Organization, the American Heart Association, the International Diabetes Foundation, the VA National Center for Health Promotion & Disease Prevention, and the Center for Disease Control Prevention (CDC), as well as the NIH. As a member of the American Diaetes Association (ADA) Professional Practice committee, he leads national efforts to develop guidelines for diabetes management in older adults.

In addition to continuing his long-term research on diabetes disease mechanisms and, he will leverage his clinical and epidemiological expertise to analyze social determinants of health including the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and their impact on chronic disease care in the VA health system. These efforts will seek to coordinate clinical and quality improvement initiatives to reduce the burden of COVID-19 in older adults, particularly those with other pre-existing disease and in long-term care settings.

Nahla Hamouda, M.D., Ph.D.

MUSC Postdoctoral Scholar, Regenerative Medicine and cell biology
Lecturer of Clinical Pharmacology, School of Medicine, Alexandria University, Egypt

Nahla Hamouda graduated from School of Medicine, Alexandria University, in Egypt in 2007. She received her master’s degree in clinical pharmacology in 2014 from the same university, after which she went to Japan to earn her Ph.D. from Kyoto Pharmaceutical University. Her major is gastrointestinal pharmacology where she studied the effect of change in the gut microbiota composition on the course of inflammatory bowel diseases.

She returned to Egypt in 2021, promoted to be a lecturer and started to teach pharmacology to both undergraduate and postgraduate medical students in three medical schools in Egypt, both private and National universities. She also worked as a lecturer and Postdoc visiting researcher at Ritsumeikan University in Japan for 3 years before joining MUSC. She had been exposed to the educational process among medical and pharmaceutical universities both in Egypt and Japan.

Currently she is extending her scope of research to uncover how our gut health affects our neuronal health both centrally and peripherally.