Rita Giacaman is professor of public health at the Institute of Community and Public Health, which she founded in 1978 at Birzeit University, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. As a researcher and practitioner, Giacaman played an important role in the development of the Palestinian primary healthcare model, in the establishment of the first women’s health program, and in building the Palestinian community-based disability rehabilitation network. Her ongoing work entails the development of measures to assess context-appropriate psychosocial health programs to generate capacity to endure and resist ongoing war-like conditions, especially among youth.
