He received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering in 1992, 1994, and 1998, respectively, from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, U.S.A. He has 47 journal and conference publications. He won a number of teaching, research and community service awards. He has remarkable contribution in organizing many conferences, symposiums and workshops. His research interests include speech recognition, speaker recognition under neutral, stressful, and emotional talking conditions, emotion and talking condition recognition, gender recognition using voice, and accent recognition in each of Arabic and English languages.