The MENA region has been going through turmoil of war and conflict in the past decades. People of the MENA region have been living waves of revolutions, oppression, genocide and apartheid in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Jordan has been a haven for refugees from all these countries. There have been recent efforts in the past few years to understand the refugee experience from a local perspective to ensure ownership and authenticity of the local population and to work towards policies and regulations that will create better conditions and opportunities for refugees and their host communities. In this session we will share recent novel research that strives to understand the local perspective and to understand the underlying biology of behaviors in this unique population. This will help in decolonizing science and research as well as understanding the biological mechanisms of disease that will serve humanity as a whole.

The session will present Fuzzy cognitive mapping as an innovative research methodology to understand the authentic perceptions of various behaviors such as agency among Syrian refugee females compared to Jordanians. Immune markers and hormones among adolescent female refugees and their correlations with trauma, epigenetic changes in adolescence Syrian refugees and intergenerational epigenetics signature of trauma in multigenerational of Syrians exposed to violence as well as looking at a comprehensive metabolome among Syrian refugees to discover predictive patterns of mental health challenges as a result of trauma. In addition, to showing how lifestyle differences (rural versus urban) impact physiology at the molecular level among Amazigh populations in North Africa. Lastly research around the impact of therapeutic fasting on Type 2 Diabetes progression in animal models stemming from human experiences and practices.