Alan S. Weber

Dr. Alan S. Weber, PhD, has taught the Medical and Health Humanities–including literature and medicine, and the history, philosophy and sociology of medicine–at Weill Cornell Medicine–Qatar for the past sixteen years. He was a pioneer of web-based learning in the early 1990s with one of the first entirely online course offerings in New York State. He has written over 32 articles on online learning and is the editor with Dr. Sihem Hamlaoui of E-Learning in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region (Springer, 2018), the first comprehensive research handbook on the topic in the MENA region. He has directed a number of narrative medicine and medical humanities projects in Qatar at the national and institutional level including a nationally-distributed public brochure on Health Website Reliability, a Arabic/English book of patient education cancer survivor stories for the Qatar Cancer Society, a QNRF-funded research project on Literature and Medicine, six volumes of medical student essay writing, and the first cross-disciplinary Art-Medicine undergraduate course in the Arabian Gulf (with Stephen Scott, M.D.). He conducted an interventional educational trial on the use of graphic novels in medical ethics teaching in 2015. He has organized and Co-Directed twelve ACCME-accredited workshops on the medical humanities at WCM-Q. He was the lead organizer of the 1st and 2nd International Conferences on the Medical Humanities in the Middle East in 2018 and 2022. He shared with his co-authors the 2017 Outstanding Book Award from the U.S. National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).