He is a licensed architect and a trained ethnographer with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation “Compounds of Modernity: National Order and the ‘Other’ in Egypt (1940-present)” was completed in August 2015. He lectured at UC Berkeley, Academy of Arts in San Francisco, and the American University in Cairo. His ongoing book project, Building ‘New Compounds’: A History of Housing and Development in Contemporary Egypt (1940-2011), falls within the domains of biopolitics and control, hygiene and growth, postcoloniality and neoliberalism.