Mohamed Abdel Kader Mohamed Salem took the reins of the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) last Thursday. According to a biography on the MCIT's website he specializes in infrastructure planning, strategic project management, design and planning of training programs, and training of professionals Salem comes to the ministry from the Information Technology Institute (ITI), where he was chairman and served on the board of trustees. He worked at ITI since 1993, when it was founded. The ITI provided training programs to new graduates, and professionals. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Ain Shams, after receiving his B.S. from the Military Technical college in the same subject. Salem is also an academic, serving on academic committees related to Information Technology at Cairo University and Sixth of October University. He was previously a lecturer with an emphasis on artificial intelligence, software engineering, and electronic commerce. The new minister also was a consultant in the IT industry. He also chaired the Conference of Information and Communication Technology, the International Conference of Multimedia and the Arabic Conference for Geographic Information Systems Salem was appointed to the position on short notice, after Hazem Abdel Azim was excluded from the cabinet at the last moment, due to purported connections to an Israeli Technology company. BM
