Doing something for AUB students – establishing the Hanane Koteiche Scholarship
January 10, 2022
AUB alumnus Hassane S. Mchaourab (BS ’87), PhD, recently established a scholarship at AUB in the name of his late wife, Hanane Koteiche (BS ’91). “It’s the right time,” he explains, pointing to the many AUB students who need scholarship support. Mchaourab, who is the Louise B. McGavock Chair, Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at Vanderbilt University, understands these students’ situation especially well. He was once one of them. “I entered AUB in 1984,” he remembers, “just as the Lebanese pound was being devalued. Overnight my parents’ salaries were worth practically nothing.” He and his brother and sister – and all of his friends, says Mchaourab – received financial support, many from the Hariri Foundation. Even with that support, money was tight. “During my first semester at AUB, I had only one pair of jeans. I tell my daughters about those days now and they can’t quite believe it.”
It was several years later that he met his late wife, Hanane. Like Hassane, she too majored in physics. “We met at AUB – at the Physics Department in fact,” he says. They stayed in touch after Hassane went to the US in 1989 to pursue a PhD in biophysics at the Medical College of Wisconsin. They got married in 1991. Hanane, who passed away tragically in 2014, earned her PhD degree in 1997.
Associate Vice President for Development Walid Katergi recently traveled to Nashville, Tennessee to meet with Mchaourab and a dozen other AUB alumni. “His visit was so important to all of us,” says Hassane, “and pushed me to want to do something to help AUB students now.”
The Hanane Koteiche Scholarship supports women students pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. “Hanane really cared about women’s rights and supporting women, providing them with opportunities, so this made sense to me,” says Hassane. Hanane also believed strongly that we should all – as much as we can – do right by other people. “I think about that a lot especially these days when the need is so great and a little bit can go such a long way,” says Hassane. Like so many Lebanese expatriates in the US these days, he and his brother are helping family back in Lebanon, “but I wanted to do something for AUB students as well,” he says.