Hibah Osman is a senior palliative care physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Her work focuses on advocacy and program development in low- and middle-income countries, and adaption of palliative care to local context. She is a faculty affiliate in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS and is part of the core team involved in building the department’s Program in Global Palliative Care. 

Her activities to date have focused on the development of palliative care in Lebanon and the Middle East. She is a member of the Palliative Care Regional Expert Network at WHO EMRO—a World Health Organization advisory group for the Eastern Mediterranean region that she helped establish. It has been working on a roadmap for the development of palliative care in the region since 2019. She served as guest editor for the Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal’s special issue on palliative care published in 2022. 

Dr. Osman is founder of Balsam, the Lebanese Center for Palliative Care, which is a nongovernmental organization that provides home-based palliative care; she is also  founding director of the Palliative and Supportive Care Program at the American University of Beirut Medical Center’s Naef K. Basile Cancer Institute. She is lead author of the Atlas of Palliative Care in the Easter Mediterranean Region and co-chaired a committee that developed the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s palliative care resource-stratified guideline for the global setting. 

Dr. Osman has been a member of the IAHPC since 2009 and has served on the Board of Directors since 2019. She is a member of the advisory groups for the Advocacy Program as well as the Atlantes Group project on assessing Africa and global palliative care development.

Hibah enjoys knitting, yoga, hiking, and spending time with her three children.