Abdelzaher earned bachelor's and master's degrees in at computer and electrical engineering at Ain Shams University,[1] followed by a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1999, advised by Kang G.
[2] He is the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois.
[3] Abdelzaher was chief editor of the Journal of Real-Time Systems for twenty years.
[4] In 2019, Abdelzaher was awarded fellow status by the Association for Computing Machinery.
[5] He was granted an equivalent honor by the IEEE in 2021,[6] "for contributions to cyber-physical systems and real-time computing.