CUNY SPH is delighted to announce that Professor Ghada Soliman has been appointed interim associate dean for faculty affairs, effective January 27, 2025.
Dr. Soliman is a tenured professor of nutrition in the Department of Environmental, Occupational, and Geospatial Health Sciences and director of the Environmental and Planetary Health Sciences (EPHS) PhD program at CUNY SPH. She is also an affiliated faculty at the Structural Biology Initiative of the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center.
She received her medical degree from Cairo University in Egypt and earned her PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Arizona in Tucson, with a major in nutritional biochemistry and a minor in immunology and microbiology. She was awarded a USDA postdoctoral fellowship at the Children’s Nutrition Research Center and was an NIH-T32 postdoctoral trainee in atherosclerosis and vascular biology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. In addition, she completed her dietetic internship at the University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers in Ann Arbor and is a licensed registered dietitian nutritionist (RD).
At CUNY SPH, Dr. Soliman serves as chair of the school-wide admissions committee and the Environmental, Occupational, and Geospatial Health Sciences (EOGHS) faculty search committee, and as a member of the SPARC KIPS/Bay Space Committee, the staff awards committee, the College Association Board of the Graduate Students Government Association, and the strategic planning committee. She served an integral role in revising the MPH in Public Health Nutrition curriculum, expanding the academic nutrition agenda, and developing the EPHS PhD curriculum.
She received the Dean’s Merit Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2019 and is the 2023-2024 recipient of the CUNY Career Success Fellowship. She teaches courses in community nutrition, lifespan nutrition, nutrient metabolism, and pathophysiology. She has mentored many graduate students at the master’s and doctoral levels and is actively engaged in public health nutrition research.
Prior to her appointment to CUNY SPH in 2017, Dr. Soliman served on the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Western Michigan University, and the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor.
Dr. Soliman’s interdisciplinary research encompasses precision nutrition approaches to promote public health and disease prevention. Her research integrates wet laboratory methods of nutrient-sensing pathways, such as the mechanistic Target of the Rapamycin (mTOR) complexes metabolic networks, to investigate the role of the nutritional exposome in metabolic diseases and cancer. Her current research leverages the All of Us national database to investigate the factors contributing to type 2 diabetes and the progression stages of the Cardiovascular-Kidney-Metabolic (CKM) syndrome. Her translational research focuses on the contributing role of the nutritional and dietary patterns and the non-genetic drivers of human diseases to develop interventions that reduce the disease burden and health disparities.
Dr. Soliman received research grant funding from the National Institute of Health NIH-K01 Career Development Award, the American Heart Association, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation, as well as institutional grants to support her independent and collaborative research. Her research productivity resulted in over 55 peer-reviewed publications in nutrition research and book chapters on nutrition, cholesterol metabolism, and causes of obesity. She is an associate editor of the journal Frontiers on Public Health and Nutrition, guest editor for the journal Nutrients, and special issues and ad-hoc reviewer for several peer-reviewed journals. In addition, she is a member of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the American Public Health Association, and the American Society for Nutrition, among others.
“We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Soliman to this new role,” says Dean Ayman El-Mohandes. “Her dedication to academia over the past 25 years will be a great asset in advocating for and supporting faculty development at CUNY SPH.”
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Soliman, who can be reached at ghada.soliman@sph.cuny.edu.