Dr Alic completed his studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His first postdoctorate was on the biochemistry of transcription by the yeast RNA polymerase III, with Drs Carles and Riva at Commissariat à l'énergie atomique, France. He arrived in UCL as an EMBO/Marie Curie fellow to work with Prof Partridge. He started his own laboratory at UCL in 2013.