Carmel is the Snyder Granadar Chair for Genetics, and is the 2021 Massry Prize laureate for his studies in the field of ancient DNA.

In 2004, Carmel went to the United States for postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he specialized in molecular evolution in the research group of Eugene Koonin.

Carmel returned to Israel in 2008, and established a computational biology research group at the department of Genetics, the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

[9] In this work, he sequenced DNA from dozens of Canaanite individuals that used to live in the Southern Levant during the Bronze Age, in sites such as Megiddo and Hazor.

Carmel found that the Canaanites formed as an admixture of local populations with people that arrived from the north-east, from regions that today include western Iran and the Caucasus, and that the process continued for hundreds of years.