​Omar Knio received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 1990 from MIT. He held a postdoctoral associate position at MIT, before joining the Mechanical Engineering Faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 1991.

In 2011, he joined the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department at Duke University, where he also served as Associate Director of the Center for Material Genomics. In 2012, he was named the Edmund T. Pratt, Jr., Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke.

In 2013, he joined AMCS Program at KAUST, where he also served as Deputy Director of the SRI Center for Uncertainty Quantification in Computational Science and Engineering, as Interim Dean of the Division of Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering, and as Associate Vice President, National Partnerships, Engagement and Academic Liaison, of the KAUST National Transformation Institute.

In October 2024, he was appointed as Interim Vice President, Education and Academic Affairs.

He is a founding Associate Editor of SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification, and currently serves on the Editorial Board of International Journal for Uncertainty Quantification.

He is the recipient of an Associated Western Universities Faculty Fellowship Award in 1996, a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award in 2003, an R&D100 Award in 2005, and a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the American University of Beirut in 2005, and of an Abdul-Hameed Shoman Award for Arab Researchers in 2019.