Home page
ع
Resources for Current Students, Faculty and Staff
Webmail Directory Catalog Banner Canvas Moodle
Primary Navigation Background
Quick Links / AUC Directory, Faculty Directory
Man with glasses and formal attire smiles
  1. NEWS
  2. Dean Sherif Kamel Appointed to Central Bank of Egypt Board of Directors

Dean Sherif Kamel Appointed to Central Bank of Egypt Board of Directors

Dalia Al Nimr December 04, 2023
Business

Professor and founding dean of AUC’s School of Business, has been appointed to the board of the Central Bank of Egypt as a financial expert.

Sherif Kamel ’88, ’90, ’13, professor and founding dean of AUC’s School of Business, has been appointed to the board of the Central Bank of Egypt as a financial expert.

“I truly appreciate the trust and confidence placed in me, and I look forward to working with the other board members to advance the bank's vision and achieve its strategic objectives,” said Kamel.

Such an appointment signifies AUC's dedication to excellence and service, showcasing the high caliber of its faculty and alumni, who are go-to experts in their fields. “AUC takes great pride in its commitment to serving Egypt through the exceptional contributions of its alumni and faculty, and Dean Sherif Kamel is a prime example of that,” said President Ahmad Dallal. “Dean Kamel is an invaluable leader at AUC and an internationally respected authority in his field. He exemplifies AUC's deep commitment to serving Egypt through its experts, research and partnerships.”  

“Honored and delighted by the opportunity,” Kamel noted, “As dean of the School of Business, my appointment to the board reflects the invaluable opportunities the faculty of The American University in Cairo are given to contribute their knowledge and expertise to serve our society, especially at a time of continuous transformations with its different challenges and prospects.”

“Dean Kamel is an invaluable leader at AUC and an internationally respected authority in his field. He exemplifies AUC's deep commitment to serving Egypt through its experts, research, and partnerships.”  

A Journey of Excellence

Such distinctions are not new to Kamel, whose connection to AUC spans 40 years, during which he earned three academic degrees and spent nearly three decades as a faculty member.

At AUC, during his tenure as dean, AUC’s School of Business received the triple-crown accreditation in 2014, making it among 1% of business schools worldwide as well as the only business school in the Middle East and third in Africa to achieve this prestigious recognition, which has been reaffirmed over the years. It has also been ranked by Eduniversal among the top 100 business schools in the world every year since 2012 and among the best business schools in Africa for the last seven consecutive years. In addition, the AUC Venture Lab, established during Kamel’s time, is the first University-based incubator in Egypt, classified among the five most promising university incubators in Africa.

“As dean of the School of Business, my appointment to the board reflects the invaluable opportunities the faculty of The American University in Cairo are given to contribute their knowledge and expertise to serve our society, especially at a time of continuous transformations with its different challenges and prospects.”

Outside AUC, Kamel’s list of achievements is equally impressive. He serves as vice chair and chair-elect of the board of directors of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the oldest global accrediting body for business schools with the largest network of schools, educators, learners and businesses worldwide. He will serve as the board’s chair for the 2024-2025 academic year and is now heading its Innovation Committee. Kamel was recognized by AACSB in 2018 as one of its Influential Leaders Challenge Honorees, being a business leader who influences business education. He also served as a trustee of the International Management Board of the Association of MBAs and the Business Graduates Association.

Kamel is a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt's Board of Governors and previously served as the board’s president from 2019 to 2021. In addition, he is deputy chair of CEMS (Community of European Management Schools) - The Global Alliance in Management Education, of which AUC’s School of Business is a member. A prolific author, he has published numerous scholarly articles and books, the most recent of which is Leading Change in Challenging Times: Lessons of Disruption and Innovation from Egypt – Thoughts, Observations, and Reflections (2022).

Passionate about education, Kamel holds a bachelor’s in business administration, an MBA and a master’s in Islamic art and architecture from AUC as well as a PhD in information systems from the London School of Economics and Political Science. 

Related stories

Bernard O'Kane taking a photo of tiles, with the monuments collaged onto the image

Tiles That Tell

The summer after his first year of university, Bernard O’Kane boarded a train from Ireland to Istanbul, emerging in a world of brightly colored tiles. The next year, he took the same train to Istanbul and boarded a boat to Alexandria to see the architecture of Egypt. He continued this habit a third summer, venturing further east from Turkey into Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The colorful art and architecture of the Islamic world captured O’Kane in a way he wasn’t able to shake then.Now a professor of Islamic art and architecture in the Sheikh Hassan Abbas Sharbatly Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations, O’Kane’s love of travel never faded. He regularly visits places in the Middle East and Central Asia to investigate the historical architecture and tilework around the region. Most recently, O’Kane traveled to Turkmenistan, researching the tilework of monuments in Kuhna Urgench. This historical site was the capital of the Khorezm region with monuments including a mosque, the gates of a caravanserai, fortresses, mausoleums and a 60-meter-high minaret. O’Kane was drawn to the tilework, whose soulful colors have endured more than seven centuries.“Tilework is a particularly important form of Islamic art. It serves as a colorful, vibrant way to shape the identity of sacred and secular spaces,” he said. 
Arts and Culture
book cover

Visual Voices

“I always insist on the collective because this is how you change history,” says Bahia Shehab (MA ’09), professor of practice in the Department of the Arts and co-editor of Revealing, Recording, Reflecting: Graphic Women from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), the first publication of its kind to document the work and legacy of contemporary women designers.“This landmark book is about the ‘us’ of women,” says Shehab, who founded AUC’s graphic design program in 2011. ‘When people hold the book, I want them to recognize women’s voices in the Arab world. They are beautiful, they are colorful and they are varied. And they’re not limited to the geography of the Arab world. We are everywhere.”Full of vibrant images, the book emerged from a collaborative initiative aimed at documenting and celebrating the contributions of SWANA women in the field of design. It all started when four women graphic designers from different institutions — Shehab from AUC in Egypt, Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès from Khatt Foundation in the Netherlands, Yasmine Nachabe Taan from the Lebanese American University in Lebanon and Soukeina Hachem from Shape interior design studio in Morocco — decided to research and showcase the work of Arab women designers. “We are four women from various parts of the region who came together to reflect, collect and reveal stories of Arab women designers,” says Shehab. Not only were they tapping into an undocumented frontier, but their research process was atypical. “The normal route usually involves archives and a lot of reading,” explained Shehab. “But for this book, we decided to do something else: We opened up our research to a bigger community. So we were four curators, not authors. The idea is that it is a collective story of over 80 Arab women graphic designers that we are telling together, so there isn’t a single authority or voice.”The first step for the co-editors was to focus on themes, the types of stories they want to tell. For Shehab, the choice was clear. “I love everything about Arabic design — its calligraphy, letters and typography — so I chose to work on Ladies of Letters: women who are as passionate about Arabic letters as I am. Each of us worked on a topic that she felt eager to explore in-depth.” The book explores themes of Visual Storytelling by Women, Engaged Image-Making for Social and Political Commentary, Ladies of Letters (connecting generations of women writers and designers) and Navigating Diasporic Identities. Focusing on the work and impact of Arab women graphic designers, illustrators, calligraphers and typographers, the book includes critical writing, testimonials, primary documents and artwork. The co-editors proposed the project online, collecting reflections on the different themes through Zoom panels and collaboration with a cultural space in Berlin, Germany for people to share their insights and recommend women in the field who can be featured in the book. “That physical space became our living research space, with sticky notes, observations, posters and new books. It was the first time for us to experiment with collective crowd-sourced research, and it was an enriching experience,” Shehab says.Questionnaires were then sent out to women graphic designers, asking them to tell their own stories. “In the book, we are not reflecting on how they feel or assuming the meaning of their work. They are choosing what stories they want to tell — in their own words,” affirmed Shehab. 
Arts and Culture
Share