Elmasri got his degree in B.S. in electrical engineering (computers and automatic control) from Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt in 1972 and received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Stanford University, Stanford, California, in 1980. His dissertation title was "On the Design and Integration of Data Models", and it was one of the first research works on the two topics of "(i). Schema Integration", and "(ii).[2] Query Languages for Entity-Relationship Models".