Khalifah Family

Materials provided by Raja Khalifah.

Introduction

Raja Khalifah was born in Lebanon. As a young man, Khalifah attended the American University of Beirut, where he excelled at tennis while simultaneously completing a BS in Chemistry. After graduating from the American University in Beirut in 1962, Khalifah came to the United States to continue his education. From 1962 to 1967, he obtained a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Princeton University; he then held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University before moving to the Stanford Medical School to conduct research in pharmacology.

Though he had come to the United States with the intent of returning to Lebanon after completing his advanced education, Khalifah realized that returning home was becoming unlikely as conflict and strife escalated into the Lebanese Civil War. When open conflict erupted, Khalifah helped his mother come to America. Though Khalifah found great professional success in the United States, he has striven to preserve his culture and community ties through active participation in both the American University of Beirut Chapter of alumni and the Triangle Lebanese Association.

Between 1993 and 2000, Khalifah served as a Research Professor in Biology at the University of Kansas Medical Center. At the turn of the century, he shifted to the sphere of public pharmaceutical research, working for Biostratum Inc. and then NephroGenex Inc. In 2009, he started his own consulting firm, Raja G. Khalifah Consulting, where he provides scientific consulting related to scientific research, clinical trials, development, and pharmaceuticals related to diabetes. Khalifah holds numerous patents related to the pharmacological treatment of diabetes.

 

Scope and Contents

This collection is composed primarily of photographs. These images cover a wide variety of subjects including:  Raja Khalifah’s family members and ancestors in early-twentieth century Lebanon; biomedical pharmacology and research; and the Triangle Lebanese Association. 

Raja Khalifah

Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies

circa 1960-2010

Raja Khalifah

Collection description written by Claire A. Kempa

Donor retains full ownership of any and all copyright currently controlled in agreement with Khayrallah Center. Nonexclusive right to authorize all uses of these materials for non-commercial research, scholarly, or other educational purposes are granted to Khayrallah Center pursuant to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA).