Wael Al-Delaimy MD, PhD. Is the Principal Investigator and Director of the Program. He is Chief of the division of Global Health and Professor of Epidemiology and Global Health at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). He finished his medical degree from the Mustansyria University, Higher Graduate Diploma in Community Medicine from The University of Baghdad, and PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Otago. Before joining UCSD he was a research fellow at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and a Scientist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France.  He has developed and taught PhD level courses for students participating in the Public Health joint doctoral program in both UCSD and San Diego State University and received very good to excellent student evaluations in all of these courses. He has been the chair of the Ethics and Philosophy Committee of the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology between 2008 to 2015 leading a group of more than 60 environmental epidemiologists. He co-authored the Guidelines for Research Ethics for Environmental Epidemiologist,has been invited to write editorials on ethics for the Journal Environmental Health Perspectives, and invited by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to be key speaker on topics of ethics of sharing population data. As PI and project director for the multi-million dollar California-wide tobacco surveys since 2005, he has led multiple faculty and staff, supervising a large sub-contract with a data collection company as well as working with State officials regarding the relevance of data to health policy at the state level. He is a native of Iraq, has worked in Jordan, and has collaborators throughout the Arab world. He is also the President of the Society for Advancement of Science and Technology in the Arab World, a non-profit educational organization that has a network of expatriate and local Arab scientists who are established academics and researchers with the aim of advancing research and higher education in the MENA ( Middle East & North Africa) region.