Dr. Ali Ahrari is a Lecturer at the School of Systems and Computing, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Michigan State University (MSU) in 2016 and subsequently worked as a professional aide at MSU until June 2018. He has won some international competitions on optimization such as "Competition on niching methods for multimodal optimization" in 2016 and 2020, which was held at CEC and GECCO conferences, as well as an international student competition on structural optimization (ISCSO) in 2017 and 2018. From July 2018 to May 2022, he worked at UNSW-Canberra as a research associate/fellow in the Canberra Evolutionary Optimization group. After 15 months working as a research fellow at the University of Sydney, he returned to UNSW-Canberra in August 2023, working as a lecturer at the School of Systems and Computing.

Dr Ahrari is the recipient of the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award  (ARC-DECRA'2023) for the project "An Efficient Computational Solver for Complex Engineering Problems." His current research focuses on evolutionary algorithms to solve multimodal and multiobjective problems. Dr Ahrari has 28 peer-reviewed publications (25 papers as the first author) in scientific journals including 4 papers in lEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. He is a member of the editorial board of “Applied Soft Computing.”