After an Engineering degree from the Lebanese University in 1988 and an MSc from ENSERG/INPG Grenoble in France in 1989, Chafic Mokbel obtained his Ph.D. from ENST (Telecom ParisTech) in 1992.

He then joined France Telecom Research center CNET (Orange Lab) where he became the expert of Voice Technologies. In 1999, Chafic Mokbel led the Speech Group in IDAP, a Swiss research institute. In 2001 Chafic Mokbel joined the University of Balamand where he is currently a Professor in the Computer Engineering Department. From 2003 till 2019 he served as the secretary-general of the University of Balamand Research Council.

His research interests cover machine learning, speech and speaker recognition, handwriting recognition, signal and image processing, hidden Markov models, adaptive learning, telecommunication services, brain-computer interface, application of artificial intelligence to biomedical engineering, and quality assurance in higher education. He has developed several software and toolkits, some of them are open source. He participated to numerous international technology competitions.

He (co-)supervised more than 15 PhDs and has more than 120 scientific publications and 2 patents. He was the associate editor of Elsevier Speech Communication Journal from 1995 till 1997 and is member of ISCA, a senior member of IEEE and a member of the Lebanese Order of Engineers and Architects. He is also member of several national committees in particular the committee of LIRA (a joint programme aiming at bridging research between university and industry).

He has been an Erasmus+ Higher Education Reform Expert since 2008. He worked on several laws related to the organization of higher education in Lebanon. He has participated to more than 20 European projects (FP6, FP7, Tempus and Erasmus+) and managed some of them. He has been intensively working to develop quality assurance in the Lebanese Higher Education and has participated as an international expert in several committees formed by the French agency for the evaluation of several higher education institutions.

Winning the Arabic Handwritten Recognition Competition in ICDAR 2005.
Very good rank in other technology evaluation competitions.