Dr. Al-Assaf was a founding member and chair of the industrial engineering department at the University of Jordan, where he also worked as the outreach manager. He was a founding member of the electrical engineering and computer engineering programs at AUS since 1998. He was appointed as the Associate Dean of the College of Engineering (CEN) at AUS in 2004 and has served as the Dean of the college since 2005 till his appointment as President of Rochester Institute of Technology, Dubai. Dr. Al-Assaf's research focuses on using soft computing to model and control various industrial and medical systems.