Ali is the Senior Project Manager for the EU Horizon 2020 DOWN2EARTH project. She joined DOWN2EARTH in the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences at Cardiff University and SCI-CLAWPS in October 2020. Prior to joining Cardiff University, Ali worked as a Lecturer in Conservation Science at Bristol Zoological Society, having trained as an Evolutionary and Conservation Biologist in both New Zealand (UNITEC) and the UK (University of Oxford and UCL).

In addition to managing a range of conservation and research projects, her research interests in recent years have included investigating the impact of climate fluctuations on African penguin breeding success as well as using eDNA as a large scale monitoring tool. She has also been both module and degree programme lead as well as working with the IUCN, reassessing the red-listing of the world’s primates.