IAEA expert to visit Cuba

HAVANA, Cuba, Nov 14 (ACN) Najat Mokhtar, Deputy Director General and head of the Department of Nuclear Sciences and Applications of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will visit Cuba from November 19 to 25.

Ms. Mokhtar will visit several Cuban centers engaged in joint projects with IAEA and hold meetings with directors of several entities, including the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment, the Ministry of Public Health, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of the Interior, as well as the Cuba office of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Her program also features visits to the National Institute of Hygiene, Epidemiology and Microbiology (INHEM), the Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK) and the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences (INCA), among others in Havana and other cities across Cuba.

Prior to her appointment, she was Director of the Division for Asia and the Pacific in the Department of Technical Cooperation and, from 2012 to 2014, the Section Head of the Nutrition and Health Related Environmental Studies, Human Health Division. Before that, she was the Director of Science and Technology at the Hassan II Academy of Science and Technology in Morocco, where she coordinated the national Education and Research strategy, and worked as a university professor and research director at the University Ibn Tofail in Morocco for more than 20 years.

Ms. Mokhtar holds a PhD in Nutrition and Endocrinology from Laval University in Canada and in Food Science from the University of Dijon in France, and is a postdoctoral Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University in the United States.