Dr. Hamid E. Ali received, an M.Sc. in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000, and a PhD in Economics and Public Policy from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004.

He was a researcher at the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), where he was a major contributor on various reports to US congressional committees. Ali taught at Texas State University and Southern Methodist University. Hamid Ali is the author of Darfur's Political Economy: A Quest for Development (Routledge, 2014) and co-author with Christos Kollias of Defense Spending, Natural Resources, and Conflict (Routledge, 2017). Ali is also the author and co-author of articles in scholarly journals such Journal of Peace Research; Food Policy; Publius: The Journal of Federalism; and Defence and Peace Economics.