After the 2020 Beirut port blast, curator-archaeologist Nadine Panayot led a tech-enabled rescue at AUB’s Archaeological Museum—digitizing archives, virtually reconstructing shattered Roman glass, and scanning sites across Lebanon. She shares how community collaboration, ethical digitization, and practical tools are building resilient heritage systems ahead of her Nov 18 talk at The Met.

Environmental microbiologist Darine Salam explains why boosting native beach microbes (biostimulation) often cleans coastlines faster and with fewer side effects than chemicals or lab-engineered “superbugs.” Her team’s work shows how sampling first and dosing nutrients wisely lets nature do the heavy lifting.

AUB’s Daniel Asmar explains MGSO, a new system that turns a single phone camera into a real-time 3D mapper. It builds dense, photorealistic maps at ~30 fps using “Gaussian splats,” enabling AR, robotics, and everyday apps without special sensors.

At COP30, we look to places that have lived with heat for millennia. AUB Nature Conservation Center director Yaser Abunnasr explains how Middle Eastern indigenous knowledge—embedded in architecture, agriculture, and social norms—can guide fair, practical climate action. We spotlight NCC’s Med Trails project and a “local first, scale out” model that turns evidence from communities into usable tools and training.

Lebanon’s reliance on ~35,000 diesel generators—8–10k in Beirut alone—may be fueling one of the world’s highest bladder cancer rates. Dr. Hassan Dhaini (AUB Faculty of Health Sciences) explains his team’s multi-phase research on quasi-ultrafine particulates from generators, what those particles carry (carcinogens, heavy metals, mutagens), how they travel through the body, and why a known genetic susceptibility in Lebanese populations could be creating a “perfect storm.” He also lays out near-term fixes (diesel particulate filters and catalytic converters) and the longer-term pivot to cleaner energy.

A tiny sticker on a stop sign can fool an autonomous vehicle’s vision—no laptop needed. Professor Ali Chehab (American University of Beirut) explains a new “seatbelt for perception”: a model-agnostic defense that rides alongside existing self-driving software to catch adversarial tricks on road signs and lane markers in real time.

AUB’s Dr. Antoine Abou Fayad takes us from Lebanese fields to the lab bench to explain how his team uncovered four antibiotic-producing Streptomyces strains—three likely brand-new to science—and why those “earthy-smell” microbes could help counter the global rise of drug-resistant infections. We talk soil sleuthing, biosynthetic gene clusters, and the long road from natural product to bedside.

On Elephantine Island—where it rains as rarely as once a decade—archaeobotanist Dr. Claire Malleson uses exquisitely preserved seeds, pods, and plant fragments to piece together how ordinary Egyptians lived during the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2000–1600 BCE). When the sheer volume of data outgrew traditional methods, a serendipitous book-club meeting with Dr. Jordan Srour led to a machine-learning partnership that revealed hidden patterns: cleaner interior spaces, linen-waste storage rooms, and even a fireplace snapshot marked by a thin layer of acacia pods from a single day thousands of years ago. Malleson shows how AI doesn’t replace human expertise—it supercharges it—and how lessons from ancient agriculture can inform modern climate resilience.