As of August 2018, Adel El Zaïm is the chief internationalization officer of the University of Ottawa, Canada. He also is the founding president of Internationalization Canada.

El Zaïm has worked for several organizations in higher education, most recently as the executive director for international programs at the University of British Columbia. He was director general, internationalization, at Université de Sherbrooke, in Quebec, Canada from 2012 to 2014, and senior program specialist, information and communication technologies for development, with Canada’s International Development Research Centre, based in Middle East.

El Zaïm is a member of the Board of the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA). He also serves as the chairman of the AIEA Awards Committee and is a member of the AIEA Strategic Planning Task Force. Adel was a founding member, vice-president and president of the Internet Society in Québec (ISOC-Québec). Additionally, he was a member of the Civil Society Bureau for the World Summit on the Information Society from 2003 to 2005. He served as a member of the board of several organizations including Association ISOC Quebec, Collège de Maisonneuve (Montréal), Association of Arab translators and the Economic Local Development Centre Sherbrooke Innopole (Sherbrooke, Quebec).

​El Zaïm was born in Tripoli, Lebanon. After graduating from the Lebanese University in French language and literature, he prepared a master’s degree in didactics at University of Paris III, Sorbonne-Nouvelle, and received a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1994 from the University of Paris IV, Sorbonne. El Zaïm undertook his post-doctorate research at Université du Québec à Montréal in semiotics and human language technologies.