Ahmed Nabil Shaaban

Postdoc researcher and data scientist in the fields of medicine and global public health sciences. Member of the Swedish Burden of Diseases Team. Global Burden of Diseases (GBD) Collaborator.

Ahmed Nabil Shaaban, Ph.D. is a medical doctor and epidemiologist with clinical training in cardiovascular diseases. Early in his career, he obtained postgraduate degrees in biostatistics and healthcare and hospital management, and with over 17 years of experience, he has honed his expertise in data science and quantitative methods essential for medical, epidemiological, and socioeconomic research, including causal inference, multilevel models, regression models, and econometrics. His research unfolds along four themes: epidemiology of infectious diseases, health inequalities, HIV/AIDS, and immigrants' Health.

Dr. Nabil served as a consultant and senior data scientist at the United Nations' International Organization for Migration (IOM), specifically within the Department of Programme Support and Migration Management - Protection Division. His work in the COMPASS programme aimed at combating human trafficking and promoting safe migration. His role at IOM also included strengthening capacity building for governments and stakeholders through providing training on international standards and guidance for human trafficking administrative data.

During his career, Dr. Nabil received several awards and scholarships. These awards include the prestigious Professor Doctor Francisco Cambournac Award as the best Ph.D. student in Global Public Health, the Foundation for Science and Technology Scholarship from the Portuguese Government, the 2015 Merit Award from the World Bank and the Government of Japan, and the 2015 Brandeis University Merit Award, Massachusetts, USA. His work and published study during the COVID-19 pandemic, "Are immigrants more vulnerable to the socioeconomic impact of COVID-19?" was recognized with the gold medal Human Rights Award of the Portuguese Parliament. This recognition was for being the first comparative study in Portugal to explore the consequences of COVID-19 on immigrant families and Portuguese nationals in the municipality of Amadora, with its results being incorporated into public health programs.

Degrees:

* M.Sc. in International Health Policy and Management, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

* Master in Public Health, Faculty of Medicine Porto University, Porto, Portugal.

In his Ph.D. thesis, he examined the use of a relatively new methodology for designing models that can assess quality indicators and health care outcomes among hospitals in Portugal (namely, 30-day readmission rate and length of stay) based on longitudinal multilevel (hierarchical) population-based studies aiming at reducing health expenditures. He assessed risk factors that can predict these healthcare outcomes using various regression techniques such as logistic regression, Poisson regression, negative binomial models, and Zero-inflated models with random-effects. These studies also considered how the variation in care provided by different hospitals affects these quality outcomes.

During his first Post-Doc at Karolinska Institute, he examined the causal relation between tobacco and COVID-19 through one of the largest population-based studies among three Nordic countries. This work was part of a population-based project (Tobrisk-Cov) in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. This project aimed to analyze longitudinal data on the relation between smoking and COVID-19 from population-based samples in which each country will provide and analyze population-based cohorts during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his second Post-Doc at Karolinska Institute, and as a member of the Swedish Global Burden of Disease team, Dr. Nabil is responsible for investigating how diagnosed migraine, headache, depression, and anxiety are geographically distributed by small-area deprivation across all the 21 regions of Sweden and whether there is an increased risk of diagnosis by area of deprivation. This project is a collaboration between Karolinska and Pfizer. He is also assisting in creating a small-area deprivation index for Sweden using the entire national Global Burden of Disease database.

Dr. Nabil also led several studies focusing on assessing risk factors of several health outcomes using various statistical methods aiming at guiding health policy-making. Highlights of these works include comparing healthcare use and access across different groups in Portugal, including migrants, identifying a wide range of factors that can influence self-perceived health status among a representative sample in Portugal, and analyzing macro-level panel data to estimate an empirical aggregate health production function in 52 African countries with life expectancy gains as the output of the health care system and various socio-economic, environmental, and lifestyle factors as contributory factors.

Dr. Nabil taught several postgraduate (Master and Ph.D.) courses on biostatistics, data analysis, and econometrics for public health at the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (IHMT), Nova Lisboa University, Portugal.