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Professor is the founding chairman of the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Balamand.

Prof. Henri EL ZAKHEM was appointed in 2007 to establish the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Balamand as its founding chairperson, following a generous donation from the late Maroun Semaan. He held his role as chairperson until 2019. During this period, under his leadership, UOB launched the first Chemical and Petroleum Engineering program in Lebanon. Prof. Zakhem assisted in the Maroun Semaan Building design, which included 10 state-of-the-art academic and research laboratories complementing the educational programs - BS, BE, and MS. In addition, he prepared and presented the accreditation file for the Chemical Engineering program for the University of Balamand in Dubai in 2017, and as a part of the FOE ABET Team, he led the departmental efforts towards ABET accreditation in 2019.

Prof. EL ZAKHEM completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering in 2.5 years from the University of Technology of Compiegne, France (2006). He is a holder of a Master degree (D.E.A) in Food Processing Engineering (2003), and a Teaching Diploma in Clinical Psychology from the Lebanese University (2002). He also holds an Agricultural Engineering Diploma from USEK (2000).

He joined UOB in 2007 as an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and was subsequently promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2014, and in 2020, to Full Professor.

Under his chairmanship, an international capacity-building grant “GOPELC”, €563,656, was secured from the European Union. The project was for the duration of 3 years (2016-2019) with partners from Romania (Universitatea Petrol Si Gaza Ploeisti), Sweden (Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan), France (Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Saint-Etienne), and Lebanon (Lebanese University, NDU, BAU, and Ministry of Higher education). The main objectives were to address the main issues that the Lebanese society and the Lebanese Higher Education system were facing: Energy problems, Gas and Oil offshore recently discovered in the Mediterranean Sea, and to provide qualified professional resources capable of sustaining and managing the gas and oil industry development. The MS Chemical Engineering Curriculum was updated with the help of European partners whom are experts in the Oil and Gas domains and more than 60 MS students already benefited from GOPELC outcomes. Workshops for UOB faculty members and internships for UOB students were performed in prestigious Upstream, Midstream, and Downstream Oil European companies, having in mind that no equivalent to these companies exists yet in Lebanon.

Moreover, Prof. EL ZAKHEM championed securing the accreditation of the American Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) with no Concerns. This accreditation is an added value for the UOB Chemical Engineering program as it is for the Bachelor of Science program while all other accredited programs are for the BE program.

In 2015, he designed the BS Chemical Engineering curriculum for the UOB in Dubai according to UAE standards. In 2017, the state accreditation was provided to the Chemical Engineering program accordingly.

Prof. EL ZAKHEM is a Senior Member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), and he is a Member of the Order of Engineers in Tripoli, Lebanon. He chaired conference sessions in many international conferences, for instance, the IEEE first International Conference on Energy, Power, Petroleum and Petrochemical Engineering, and Mediterranean Gas and Oil Conference.

Prof. EL ZAKHEM represented the Chemical Engineering faculty members in the Senate for 6 years (2013-2019). Since 2017, he has been designated as a Technical Reviewer by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education to assess the portfolios of other institutions seeking the legislative authorization of the Ministry.http://forms.balamand.edu.lb/facultyprofile/members.aspx