Ali Idrissi holds a PhD from the Department of Linguistics at the Université du Québec à Montréal and an MA in Linguistics from Mohamed 5 University. After his PhD, he obtained a 2-year postdoctoral Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant at the Department of Linguistics and the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy at McGill University. He has teaching and research experience in Canada, Morocco, UAE and Qatar.

He is currently a Professor of Linguistics at the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Qatar University.

His primary research focus is on the representation and processing of the structure of Arabic words and sentences in diglossic healthy and brain-damaged speakers. He relies on various research methods, spanning theoretical investigation and behavioral and neurophysiological methods. Thanks to a Qatar National Research Fund grant, he established the Neurocognition of Language Lab, where he has conducted EEG studies on Arabic.

Before joining Qatar University as chair of the Department of English Literature and Linguistics, he served as chair of the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Translation at the United Arab Emirates University.