Before joining AUC, she held a teaching position at the Faculty of Law at GUC (2016-2017). She completed her doctoral degree at the Faculty of Law, Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany (2016), for which she received a doctoral stipend by the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation, and conducted her research as visiting scholar at Fordham Law School in New York, USA (2014-2015). In her research, Salem assessed Egypt's domestic legal efforts towards implementing the UN Women’s Rights Convention and looked particularly into the validity of Sharia-based reservations, as well as various areas of domestic law, including Personal Status Law; Criminal Law; Labor Law; Nationality Law; Anti-Human Trafficking Law and Egypt’s 2014 Constitution, in light of gender discriminative provisions.