Dalia Samhouri, PhD, MPH
Regional Manager, Emergency Preparedness and International Health Regulations Health Emergency Programme, World Health Organization Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean
Cairo, Egypt
Dr. Dalia Samhouri is a regionally and globally known expert in the area of public health with an extensive experience at the scientific, policy, and managerial levels. Dr. Samhouri has been working with WHO for 17 years with a strong focus on global health issues. She has been working closely with the 22 countries of the Eastern Mediterranean Region, and collaborating with other UN agencies, international organizations, and regional and global technical and academic institutions.
Dr. Samhouri is currently the lead of the Health Emergency Preparedness and International Health Regulations at the Cairo-based WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean (EMRO), which takes the lead role in the design and implementation of the WHO region-wide health security preparedness and readiness to all hazard emergencies.
Since joining WHO, Dr. Samhouri has led extensive and repeated missions to the 22 countries of the region to assess and strengthen surveillance, risk assessment and response to Influenza, MERS-CoV, Ebola, Zika, the current COVID-19 and other communicable diseases. She has also been working with countries of the region to scale up national capacities in the context of mass gatherings and population movements. At a border scale, Dr. Samhouri has been leading the assessment of emergency preparedness and implementation of the International Health Regulations (2005) for health security and Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction in integration with health system strengthening.
Dr. Samhouri has a PhD degree in the Global Health from the University of Geneva, Switzerland and a master’s degree of Public Health Epidemiology/Biostatistics from Tulane University in the United States.
