UCSD Profiles

Dr. Tala Al-Rousan, MD, MPH, Assistant professor and founding faculty at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity and an affiliate faculty at the division of Geriatrics. She is an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health (UCSF and Trinity College in Dublin) at the Rhodes Trust at Oxford University, UK. She brings to UC San Diego expertise in health equity and global health research focusing on marginalized populations. Dr. Al-Rousan has extensive expertise in designing and conducting epidemiological research in limited resource settings including mix-methods and multi-disciplinary study designs. Her previous research studied the impact of institutionalization on brain health, function, and disease outcomes in the criminal justice, refugee, ethnic minorities, mobile-home dwelling, frail older adults and other marginalized populations. Trained in medicine and epidemiology in Jordan, Egypt and the US, Dr. Al-Rousan’s ongoing research focuses on designing evidence-based programmatic interventions and health policies that reduce health disparities centering a human-rights approach and using innovative technologies to promote health and longevity. In San Diego, she is currently leading a hypertension self-management intervention study among Middle Eastern and East African refugees as well as multiple projects studying dementia and barriers to care among recently-resettled Syrian and Iraqi refugees, two of the fastest growing foreign-born populations in San Diego. Internationally, she is leading a study examining the impact of encampment on cognition in Jordan and Lebanon, and is part of a study assessing hypertension management in Peru, Malawi and Cameroon. Dr. Al-Rousan is a former Doctors Without Borders physician having served in Yemen and at the headquarters in Geneva, and a Bernard Lown Fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. She is a recipient of multiple awards including the NIH K23 award, the senior Atlantic fellows award by the Atlantic Philanthropies, the American Journal of Public Health Award for Innovative Research in Aging. Dr. Al-Rousan serves as a consultant, key investigator and/or on the advisory boards of multiple agencies including the World Health Organization Commission on Migration, the Center for Life Course and Vulnerable Population Research at UC San Diego, Resolve to Save Lives Hypertension international program, the Global Brain Health Institute, the Jordanian Minister of Health, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and others. D. Al-Rousan is a current mentor to multiple students, postdocs and fellows and is available for mentorship with passion to mentor those from underrepresented backgrounds especially refugee, first-gen, LGBTQ and racial and ethnic minority students.