Dr. Hesham Arafat Mahdi

Dr. Arafat held the post of Minister of Transportation, Arab Republic of Egypt from February 2017 to March 2019, set-up all strategic plans for the restructuring of railways, metro-lines subways and LRT, maritime, dry ports, river transportation and highways. During his period, he contributed in boosting Egypt’s rank as recognized by the global competitiveness index report released by the world economic forum to a non-precedential figures (highways from 117 on 2016 to 28 on 2020, railways from 75 to 50, maritime from 65 to 48). Moreover, he instigated crucial institutional capacity process and legislation reform pertained to all mass-transportation as releasing the law of Urban transportation, law of railways, and the law of transportation using Information technology. At his taking over assignment, he unleashed the strategic plan of maritime ports and logistics up to 2030 for the first time in Egypt.

He was the Head of Structural Engineering and Construction Management Department at Future University in Egypt from 2008 until 2017.

He is a member of the International Association of Bridges and Structural Engineering (IABSE) and a member of the Scientific Committee for the New Code of Building (EC-207) for Bridges, Overpasses and Underpasses. He is also a member of the Arab Code of Bridges. Dr. Arafat published more than 35 papers focused on geotechnical, construction management, asset management, risk assessment and structural topics related to bridges, tunnels and prodigious infrastructures in international journals and international conferences. He has also supervised a 30 M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis on the subject.

He has more than 35 years of experience in the design of transportation infra-structures particularly flyovers, bridges, underpasses and tunnels. Furthermore, he has an extensive experience in conducting and supervising geotechnical studies, soil surveys for more than 900 projects in Egypt. He has also worked on structural design work for roads, bridges and tunnels for a large number of landmark projects in Egypt and in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Dr. Arafat holds a B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Structural Engineering, Faculty of Engineering Ain Shams University in Cairo. He was awarded a Deutscher Akademisascher Austausch Dienst Scholarship (“DAAD”) to conduct Ph.D. Thesis at Institute Fuer Grund-Bau und Boeden Mechanic at Braunschweig, Germany from 1993 to 1996.

Moreover, he is currently a non-executive Board member of AMER group and MiDBANK since 2020.