[7] Ragai was a faculty member in the Chemistry Department of the American University in Cairo (AUC) from 1970 until her retirement as an Emeritus Professor in 2015.
She also has a keen interest in archaeological chemistry and has published several articles that deal with the interaction of the humanities and the science.
As part of this project she studied the properties of ancient Egyptian mortars from the Sphinx and the Kephren Valley Temple.
[21] She was an invited lecturer at the following universities: Cambridge (UK), Cornell, Exeter, North Carolina at Raleigh, Princeton, Rutgers, Lund, Gothenburg, and Cardiff; also at the American Philosophical Society, the Mahmoud Khalil museum in Cairo, the American University in Paris, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (UK), and the CNRS in Marseille.
[22] She has recently been elected as a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg.