Alumni Spotlight: Khalid El-Salem, MD

Nearly 20 years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Khalid El-Salem, MD still remembers the efforts Donald Sanders, MD, took to make him feel welcome and at home when he was a neuromuscular/EMG fellow at Duke during that time. Now back in his native Jordan, El-Salem is balancing his roles as a clinical neurologist with his leadership and administrative responsibilities as vice president for the country’s leading university. For our Alumni Spotlight interview, El-Salem talks about his time as an EMG/neuromuscular fellow, balancing his administrative and clinical responsibilities, and how patterns of neurological disease in Jordan compare to those in the United States. He also talks about reading classic literature in two languages and exploring historic sites around the world when he’s not at work. What are your current responsibilities within the Jordan University of Science and Technology? What does a typical workday for you look like?
I am currently the vice president of Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST), which is the leading university in Jordan. I am responsible for the colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Applied Medical Sciences, and Graduate Studies. I am also responsible for the medical centers, the Pharmaceutical Research Center, and the Regional Center for Infectious Diseases and Antimicrobial Resistance. My leadership and administrative duties are tremendous. At the same time, I am a practicing professor of neurology with some teaching duties, and a clinical neurologist at King Abdulla University Hospital, which the university teaching hospital connected to JUST, but with obviously minimized and hyper selected clinical duties (due to heavy administrative load), which are basically limited to certain neuromuscular consults upon special request from colleague neurologists, or difficult cases in the neurophysiology laboratory requiring single fiber EMG or quantitative EMG studies. My teaching duties include occasional lectures for students, and didactic activities with the neurology residents.