Passion for Sustainability Reinforces Sense of Purpose

Published June 26, 2025

In 2023, when eight-year-old Jude Massalkhi was asked what his parents do for a living after their recent move to America, he would sweetly reply, “My dad helps people, and my mom helps the planet.”

His mom is Beirut, Lebanon-born Assile Beydoun, a sustainability communications director with global manufacturing company Procter & Gamble and a 2025 Johns Hopkins MS in Environmental Sciences and Policy graduate. An opportunity to advance her career with P&G brought the family from Dubai to Cincinnati, Ohio, the location of the company’s global headquarters. Jude’s father, Maher Massalkhi, works in refugee resettlement as an employment services supervisor for Catholic Charities.

“We have tried to role model and show our son that your job and your life’s work should have purpose,” Beydoun said. “You can find a way to build a career around trying to make a difference. I am so sad that I am almost done with the Hopkins program because I really loved the journey. It has been a wonderful experience. I did not expect this. I thought I would just study and get technical information and leave with more knowledge. But I also left with more passion, more respect, and a lot more ambition to actually be a change agent and make a difference.”

After earning an undergraduate business degree with a marketing focus from the American University in Beirut, Beydoun moved to Dubai and secured a job as a brand director for P&G in the Arabian Gulf region, primarily working on brand building and marketing for Pampers diapers. While in Dubai, she became interested in sustainability and plant-based eating and started a non-profit organization aimed at educating restaurants about the environmental and health benefits of plant-based eating. She even wrote a book, Lettuce Live Better, a guide for transitioning to a vegan diet. These interests helped her to realize that she needed to fold sustainability into her professional portfolio. This led to a broader and more relevant career opportunity as she joined P&G’s global sustainability team.

“I decided to pursue this degree at Johns Hopkins as soon as I arrived in the United States because I recognized that in my new role I was working with a lot more technical experts,” said Beydoun. “Because I now focus on sustainability communications, a big part of my role is using my communication skills to share the progress P&G is making in reducing its own impact, helping consumers reduce their impact, and helping scale solutions across industries. I am seeing a lot of value in my degree because it allows me to distill the science and to bridge the gap between the company’s technical teams and the public by saying, ‘Let me show you how we can say this better so that everyone understands it’.”

Through this program at JHU, Beydoun also discovered her passion for environmental policy, which she would like to focus on in her career, most especially the ability of policy reform to drive scale and create a larger impact. She also felt that a lot of what she learned in her climate justice courses impacted her on a personal level.

“In Beirut, many faced challenges from limited resources and core environmental justice issues to having clean water and electricity,” said Beydoun, who also witnessed the Syrian refugee crisis while in Lebanon. “My lived experiences and the information that I received at Johns Hopkins have given me perspective and humility in how I see the world and how I appreciate our resources. I see things with new eyes. I see the divergence in how, based on opportunity and geography, different people get different things.”

Having visited 40 countries, Beydoun has also seen firsthand the challenges of food scarcity in many cities.

“It is heartbreaking knowing that many children are going to be hungry, especially after seeing the serving portions at restaurants in the United States and the excessive buffets in Dubai,” she said. “Food waste is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Every time my husband wants to go to Costco, and I see a bag of potato chips larger than a toddler, I feel a wave of anxiety, not just because of the waste, but because of what we have normalized. It is very clear that the problem with world hunger is not a question of availability. It is a question of distribution.”
Beydoun hopes to leverage the passion that she experienced with her JHU professors to make an impact professionally and personally.

“I am in awe of every single one of my professors,” she said. “One of the best parts of the program was getting to meet them. They are all so passionate and accomplished, and they all bring different perspectives. They have each inspired me in a different way.

“The role that we have in protecting the environment is creating a platform where all humans can connect and agree and play a part,” she said. “The world teaches us so many lessons, and I think as you learn and grow, you realize where you can add the most value as an individual. It is so clear to me that I am not supposed to have a career in anything other than this. I feel better about the planet knowing that there are people like me, and like the faculty at Johns Hopkins, who are fighting for it.”