Abdelaziz Khlaifat is a professor of petroleum engineering and chair, Petroleum and Energy Engineering Department at The American University in Cairo (AUC). He has more than 28 years of experience, gained within different academic institutions and oil and gas industry, and in chemical and petroleum engineering. Prior to joining AUC, Khlaifat was a professor of energy engineering at the American University of Iraq (AUIS) in Sulaimani.

Khlaifat worked with different academic institutions as an instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, and professor and had held some admin positions such as founding head of Petroleum Engineering (Abu Dhabi Polytechnic), chairman of chemical engineering, vice dean of engineering, dean of mining and environmental engineering college, assistant to the president for planning and development, and director of different research centers. He spent about three years working for oil and gas industry as a senior reservoir engineer and as a manager for Weatherford Research Center located in Dharan Techno Valley in Saudi Arabia. Khlaifat was a founder/co-founder of different academic departments, research centers, and a business incubator.

Khlaifat has participated in different university-wide strategic planning, contributed intensively to different programs design and steering of multiple academic programs and recently he became an ABET Program Evaluator (PEV).

Khlaifat is an active member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) and many other technical societies at local, regional and international levels. He has authored/coauthored 110+ publications, including journal articles, book chapters in the areas of flow through porous media, hydrocarbon reservoir engineering, enhanced oil recovery, carbon capture and sequestration, unconventional tight and shale gas, managed pressure drilling, non-aqueous phase liquid transport, photocatalysis, two phase flow modeling and simulation, Dead Sea related-research, and water and environmental research. He is a recipient of several technical and academic awards and was listed among notable alumni in 2017 by the Worldwide Association of Notable Alumni (WANA).