Program Summary

PhD Grantee Profiles
Cohort 1

Ahmed Al Noubani was raised in a rural West Bank village among a family that highly values education. Six of eight of his siblings have also graduated from university. Ahmed is expansive upon his Masters of Science degree from the University of Aberdeen in the UK by earning a Ph.D. in Urban Design and Planning from the University of Washington in Seattle, which he will receive upon defending his dissertation in the fall of 2010. Ahmed has been a faculty member in the Geography Department at Birzeit University since 2004 where he has taught courses in remote sensing, biogeography, and the environment. To his credit, Ahmed also has NGO and government experience having worked at the Ministry of Planning’s Palestinian Geographic Center and the Land Research Center as a GIS and land cover expert. When asked to describe a life changing event, Ahmed explained, “Bee keeping is a major life event that changed my career direction.  Before that I had not seen the beauty and benefits of wildlife. Bee keeping turned me into a guard to my local environment and affected my decision to study and teach environmental remote sensing.” Ahmad successfully completed his coursework and comprehensive exams, and defended his dissertation on land use and land cover dynamics, using Palestine as a case study.  

 MA bios – cohort 1 to leave August 1st, 2010

Samar Sha’ban Hussein Samara
Samar is the principal of Ein Yabroud Secondary Girls School. She is from Ramallah and has been an English teacher for 11 years, after which she moved to become a principal for the past five years. She graduated from the University of Jordan and seeks to pursue a master’s degree in Educational Administration/Management/Leadership. She seeks to gain skills to assist the development of her leadership position, as well as to work effectively as an individual and as part of a group. Samar enjoys teaching English grammar to students and relatives, and hopes to gain more experience as a principal in order to be able to later teach at a college or university. Samar engaged in a series of training in topics such as time-management and communication in order to further develop her skills. She hopes to achieve an MA degree and return back to Palestine to improve the education system there.

The Palestinian Faculty Development Program’s Short-Term Fellows component is an innovative non-degree faculty exchange program designed to encourage the pursuit of academic careers, generate new approaches to curricular and pedagogical reform and provide scholarly research opportunities.  Short-Term Fellowships will also support the development of regional and international institutional partnerships and collaborative projects, thereby improving the quality of teaching and research in the social science and humanities. 

Program Design and Timeline:

Each year for up to two years, participants will spend 3-5 months at a U.S. university.  It is expected that most participants will engage in two separate spring semester visits.  Although the timing of the visit is flexible, it is expected that most participants will stay at US host universities for a full spring semester, go back to their host universities in the West Bank/Gaza for summer and fall, and then return to their US host institution for a similar period of time.   Grantees of the 2009-2010 cohort will begin their first visits in January 2010.

Eligible Fields:

Launched in October 2005, the Palestinian Faculty Development Program (PFDP) aims to increase capacity within the higher education sector in the West Bank and Gaza and address long-term issues of reform in teaching and learning practices. The program, which is funded by USAID and the Open Society Institute (OSI) and administered by AMIDEAST and OSI, has three main objectives: 1) to promote the expansion, retention, and professional development of promising academics teaching in the social sciences and humanities; 2) to revitalize and reform teaching in these areas at Palestinian higher education institutions, and 3) promote an institutional culture of teaching and learning. The following is a description of PFDP program components.

To promote the expansion, retention, and professional development of promising academics teaching in the social sciences and humanities.

PhD Fellowships: The PFDP currently has 31 Palestinian faculty pursuing their PhD degrees at sixteen US universities. The first two PhD alumni returned to Palestine last year.