Professor Elmagarmid received a Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation, and distinguished alumni awards from Ohio State University and the University of Dayton in 1993 and 1995 respectively. Professor Elmagarmid is the editor-in-chief of Distributed and Parallel Databases: An International Journal, editor of Information Sciences, Journal of Communication Systems, and editor of the book series on Advances in Database System. He has chaired and served on several program committees and served on several editorial boards.

Professor Elmagarmid's research interests focus on consistency aspects of distributed databases; heterogeneous, federated, and multidatabases; and transaction management for advanced database applications, distance learning and video databases. He has active projects in mobile databases, video databases, data quality and datawebs and is a founding member of the Purdue-On-Line effort, the Consortium for the Intelligent Management of the Electric Power Grid (CIMEG) funded by EPRI and the International Institute for Electronic Commerce (IIEC).