Dr. Akhtar Ali is a Professor of Virology in the Department of Biological Science, at the University of Tulsa. He received his Ph.D. in 1999 in plant virology from the University of Adelaide, Australia, followed by three postdoctoral research fellowships (1999-2007) in Japan, Australia, and the USA respectively before joining the University of Tulsa in 2007. His lab is mainly focused on the epidemiology, etiology, and evolution of plant viruses, particularly ssRNA viruses. In 2017, he earned the US Fulbright fellowship and worked on mycoviruses at the University of Okayama, Japan. Since then he has started working on mycoviruses particularly infecting Fusarium spp. The main focus of mycovirus research is to explore the good viruses which could be used as biological agents against pathogenic fungi that cause important diseases in agricultural crops. He also serves as an editor of several scientific journals such as Plant Disease, PhytoFrontiers, Frontiers in Microbiology, Frontiers in Virology, and Pathogens.