Ali Riaz is a Bangladeshi American political scientist and writer, currently serving as the Vice Chairman of National Consensus Commission and head of the Bangladesh Constitutional Reform Commission. He is a Distinguished Professor at Illinois State University where he joined in 2002. Most of his work deals with religion and politics, particularly on South Asian politics and political Islam. He has written extensively on Bangladeshi politics and madrasas in South Asia. He was the editor of Studies on Asia, a bi-annual journal of the Midwestern Conference on Asian Affairs (2010–2015).