Muhammad Ali Awan received his Bachelors Degree in Computer Engineering from National University of Science and Technology (NUST) Pakistan in 2005. He completed his Master's Degree in 2007 from Royal Institute of Technology(KTH) Sweden in System on Chip Design with a focus on Digital System Design and Embedded Systems. He worked as Lecturer in NUST from 2007 to 2008. Afterwards, he joined IMEC Belgium as a researcher for two years and focused on High Level Memory Management issues.

He joined CISTER Research Center in 2010 and enrolled as a PhD candidate in University of Porto Portugal. During his four years of PhD program, he participated in a research on "Real-Time Power Management on Partitioned Multicores". His research interests include real-time scheduling theory, energy-aware scheduling, heterogeneous multicore architecture design and exploration, low-power digital design and system-on-chip design methodology and resource-aware system optimizations.