Kamel graduated from the Faculty of Engineering at Cairo University with a BSc in Electrical Engineering and then completed an MSc in the same school in Electrical Engineering also.
Kamel was a network support engineer for the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, then an assistant researcher at the Electronics Research Institute. From 1989 to 1992 he pursued his Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.) in Germany at the Faculty of Electrical and Information Engineering of Technical University of Munich (Prof. Dr. J. Swoboda) under the German Academic Exchange Service.
Returning to Egypt, he became manager of the Communications and Networking Department and the Cabinet Information and Decision Support Centre, and gained a professorship at the ERI.
In May 1999 he became Vice President of ERI and the Egyptian Internet Society. In 2002 he became a Trustee of the Internet Society, and was active in numerous international conferences and initiatives. From 2000-2004 he served on the board of Telecom Egypt.
Before being appointed Minister, Kamel served as Senior Advisor to his predecessor for five years.
Since 2004, Dr. Kamel has acted as Chairman of the Executive Bureau of the Arab Telecommunications and Information Council of Ministers. He is also the Chairman of the Ministerial Conference on Communication and Information Technologies of the African Union (2006-2008). In recognition of his leadership in the sector, in 2005 the South African Ministry of Communications named him “Top Minister in Africa with an ICT Portfolio”.
Currently, besides being Minister of Communications and Information Technology in Prime Minister’s Dr. Ahmed Nazif Cabinet, Dr. Kamel is the Chairman of the National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA), the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), the National Telecommunication Institute (NTI) and the Information Technology Institute’s (ITI) Board of Trustees.