Ali was a post-doctoral researcher in the Skeletal Biology and Biomechanics Lab, and lecturer in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. He obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the Biomechanics and Control Lab at Yale University. At Harvard, he worked on the biomechanics of the human foot, specifically, the contribution of the arches of the foot to its stiffness, and how muscles modulate it during locomotion. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Roorkee (B.Tech. 2014). In the past, he has worked at the Nonlinear and Non-equilibrium Physics Unit at OIST, Japan (2015), the Learning Algorithms and Systems Lab at EPFL (2014), Switzerland, the Institute for Control Systems at TUHH, Germany (2013) and NCBS-TIFR, India (2012).