Hawraa Ayoub, Ph.D., is a staff scientist with expertise in analytical and physical chemistry. She assists the firm’s attorneys and their clients with technical matters related to regulatory compliance for food-contact packaging, cosmetics, and medical products in the European Union, Member States, and other global jurisdictions. She advises on testing protocols to help generate data required for petitions and dossiers for submission to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), and other agencies throughout Europe and the Middle East. 

Hawraa has extensive experience with analytical techniques, such as GC, LC, MS, and spectroscopy analytical methods, characterization techniques, and property prediction tools (QSAR toolbox, EPI suite, Toxtree, and others). She has strong expertise in performing health risk assessment to evaluate human exposure to chemicals present in food packaging materials, mainly plastics, paper, cardboard, and cosmetic materials (such as adsorbent hygiene products), using conservative approaches at different tiers. She also has worked on studying the release, fate, and transport of organic chemicals in soil, water, and air originating from direct use, waste, and effluent disposal, or leached from materials, and assessing their environmental risk. In addition, she has technical experience on REACH matters and Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs).

Prior to joining Keller and Heckman, Hawraa was a research engineer at a major corporation where she evaluated the migration of chemicals from food packaging (with and without contact) by experiments and modelling and conducted exposure assessments based on European and International regulations. She has published a number of scientific articles, including ones on the analysis of micropollutants in water through the use of the mass balance approach and photocatalysis.