Omar is a recipient of the Yehuda Elkana Doctoral Fellowship (2019) from The Yehuda Elkana Center for Higher Education at Central European University (CEU). He is currently enrolled as a doctoral candidate of public policy at Central European University (CEU) in Budapest/Vienna.
He received his master's degree in Public Administration (MPA) from the American University in Cairo (AUC) in 2017, with focus on the management of nonprofit and development organizations, and his bachelor's degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Alexandria, Egypt in 2011.
Omar's research interests include higher education policy with focus on the transition-to-employment process of higher education graduates, labor market policy, and sociology of higher education. His doctoral research project is a sociologically informed and a policy-oriented inquiry into the nature of humanities graduates' transitions, with focus on overeducation as a labor market phenomenon.
Besides his academic interests, Omar is an international development professional with eight years of professional experience, six of them were in project management in the development sector. He has taken on many roles in several Egyptian and international development organizations, including the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and the German Development Agency (GIZ). Over those years, Omar's professional interests spanned over a broad scope of professional interests that included entrepreneurship development, science education, school-to-work transition, and technical education.