Karim holds PhD from the Univ. of NY at Buffalo, BS London Univ and a Master in Civil eng. from Sheffield Univ. His multi-disciplinary academic, research, advisory and collaborative activities span several continents and subject areas. He is expert on ground and water research and modeling of their engineering properties and associated risks. He lectured and conducted research at several universities (NL: Twente, UK: Cambridge, Queen Mary College, Glasgow, Kings College London, US: SUNY- Buffalo, Tehran: KNTU; Baghdad: Univ. of Technology and the Military Academy; LEB: Leb. American Univ.)
His appointment as advisor to the IRQ ministry of oil and later as senior adviser to the deputy PM for energy involved him in high level EU-IRQ Energy relations, studies and agreements from 2008 to 2014. Among the important outcomes are: 1) the first flagship study on Iraq energy outlook, issued in 2012 by the International Energy Agency IEA; 2) EU-IRQ energy centre EUIEC agreement and proposal submitted in 2016 to the EU by Ronald Berger Gmb; 3) initiated and coordinated a post-doc program in the NL for five Shell-IRQ scholars and supervised five completed PhDs from Iraq in several NL and US univ. The PhD researches include field studies, training on and installation of sensors in oil fields in the south of IRQ to model and treat salinity problems in oil-associated and surface water. Karim is a member of several international professional societies and technical committees of ICE and ASCE and serves on editorial panels in journals in the fields of soil, hydraulic and petroleum engineering. His scientific output in 2018 is 6 peer-reviewed journal papers with total exceeding 80 articles.