Lynn Abdouni, CED’s first PhD candidate to successfully pass her qualifying exams (January 2019) has just received a grant to attend the Summer Dissertation Institute in Beirut, Lebanon this summer. Sponsored by the Arab Studies Institute (ASI) in partnership with the American University of Beirut’s Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES), the institute is designed to bring together scholars whose research focuses on Lebanon, and provides a framework for facilitating and advancing critical doctoral dissertation research. The institute is supported by the Arab Studies Institute (ASI) and George Mason University (GMU). The summer institute is housed on the American University campus in Beirut and will comprise eleven intensive days in June of seminar discussions, state-of-the-field lectures by invited scholars, and site visits to various institutions.
Members of Lynn’s doctoral dissertation committee include: Professors Jack Crowley, Rosanna Rivero, Umit Yilmaz, and Stephen Ramos of the CED, and Robert Awuah-Baffour from the UGA College of Engineering. The topic of her dissertation and focus of her graduate study is transportation planning for multi modal corridors, with emphasis on geospatial analysis methods to assess land use response. She has selected the Beirut-Damascus segment of the Pan-Arab Highway as a case study.
Lynn has also received a grant from the American Planning Association – International Division to conduct a comparative study on three transportation nodes along the Pan-Arab Highway, which she will also conduct on her summer research trip.
Lynn lives with her family in Athens, but retains ties to her native homeland of Lebanon and her alma mater, The American University of Beirut. She holds degrees from there (BFA in Graphic Design) and from Chatham University (Master of Landscape Design and Development), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Here at CED, Lynn has taught graphics to historic preservation and landscape architecture students [and is painting the Tanner building in rainbow colors] while she pursues her doctorate.
Congratulations, Lynn!
