Mona Khoury

Professor Mona Khoury (Ph.D.) is a full professor and the Vice President for Strategy and Diversity. She is the previous Dean of the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. First in her family to reach higher education, Mona was voted one of the top 3 most influential women in Israel by Globes magazine and last year received the coveted Israel Presidential Medal of Honour Award, one of only 13 recipients of which 2 are from the Hebrew University.

She is an alumna of the Israel Young Academy and of the Global Young Academy.
She holds the Frances and George Katz Family Chair at the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University. In 2021, Prof. Khoury won the Bruno Memorial Award, presented to young scholars by the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS).

She was a 2002 Fulbright Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, and a visiting professor at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work University of Toronto for two, non-subsequent, academic years, 2011-12 and 2016-17.

Prof. Khoury received the President of Israel’s Medal of Honour in recognition of her extraordinary contribution to the State of Israe. In March 2022, Prof. Khoury was ranked third in Globes magazine’s annual list of the fifty most influential women in Israel under the category of “Society, Education and Academia.”

In her role as VP for Diversity, she is responsible for determining and implementing overall policies, strategies, and models for promoting diversity and inclusion at the Hebrew University. Specifically, aiming to increase the accessibility of groups currently underrepresented in Israeli academia, including ultra-Orthodox Jews, Arabs, Jews of Ethiopian descent, first generation to higher education, and people with disabilities. In addition, we continue to work towards being an inclusive university where every student feels welcome and safe to flourish academically, personally, and socially.

As a VP for Strategy, together with the Strategic Unit and a dedicated committee of 34 academic and administrative staff members, she is currently formulating a ten-year strategic plan for the university. The committee is divided into four subcommittees that propose comprehensive plans on goals, targets, and tools to achieve them in the respective fields of research, teaching, community and diversity, gender and inclusion.

Prof. Khoury’s research revolves around issues related to child and youth welfare. It focuses on child and adolescents’ deviant and delinquent behaviors in three particular areas: school violence, cyberbullying, and juvenile delinquency and political violence. Her research examines how sociopolitical context influences child and adolescent development and adjustment, both cross-culturally within Israel and in other societies such as Canada and the US (with particular focus on immigrants and ethnic minorities). This research is aimed to expand the theoretical understanding of how children’s behavior is the result of an interplay of contextual factors, including their own characteristics and dynamics, and those of their family, peers, teachers, and neighborhood, and their cultural affiliations. The results of her research have implications for the development of culture- and gender-specific intervention strategies targeted at deviance and delinquency among youth.