Dr. Tayseer Alkarim a Senior Fellow at the NYU Center on International Cooperation.
Dr. Alkarim is a Syrian physician, humanitarian, and nonviolence activist, with over a decade of field experience in responding to humanitarian crises. Functioning in a variety of roles within both local and international organizations, he focuses on complex humanitarian crises, especially in conflict settings.
When armed conflict broke out in Syria in 2011, Dr. Alkarim co-founded the Doctors Coordinate of Damascus, a pilot initiative providing healthcare services to civilian victims outside the government health system controlled by the Syrian state. He also co-founded the Syrian Non-Violence Movement, which led a wide range of civil and peaceful activities across Syria.
After leaving Syria in 2012, Dr. Alkarim has worked on humanitarian interventions in armed conflict zones and low-resource settings in Iraq and Yemen, in addition to short-term medical missions to crisis-affected countries such as Bangladesh, Gaza, Colombia and others. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, he co-founded First Consultant Information Center (FCIC), which is a grassroots initiative providing context-specific advice for frontline medical and humanitarian workers in more than ten low-income and conflict-affected countries.
Dr. Alkarim has published in English and Arabic on the impact of the COVID-19 on vulnerable populations in armed conflict zones. His current research focuses on two topics: the impact of violence and other institutional factors on the health system in armed conflict zones, and future progressive models of humanitarian intervention.