Ali is a faculty member in the Department of Earth Sciences and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and a Physics Fellow at Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge. He is also affiliated with the National Oceanography Centre, UK. Within Cambridge, he is also associated with the Institute for Energy & Environmental Flows, the Centre for Climate Repair, the Quantitative Climate and Environmental Sciences, the AI for Environmental Risk Centre for Doctoral Training, and the Institute for Computing in Climate Sciences.

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Ali is the founding director of CREST. Prior to joining Cambridge, he was an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) at Imperial College (2018-2022), a NERC Independent Research Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford/St. Hugh's College (2017-2018). Ali got his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2013 and was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT (2013-2016) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography (2016-2017).