Omar was born in Alexandria, Egypt to an Egyptian mother and an Ethiopian father, but was raised in Toronto, Canada.
Omar's master's thesis was titled "Combinatorial Approaches to the Jacobian Conjecture" and was advised by Ian P.
De Loera, and his dissertation was titled "Applications of Convex and Algebraic Geometry to Graphs and Polytopes".
[5] In the fall of 2013 Omar moved to Harvey Mudd College and took a position as tenure track faculty in the mathematics department.
[8] Omar's work in promoting diversity has been written about in Forbes Magazine,[9] and he has been a guest on the Scientific American podcast "My Favorite Theorem".