Dr. Afzal received the PhD degree with highest distinction in Computer Science from the Graz University of Technology, Austria, secured Gold medal in his M.Sc Computer Science from Quiad-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He has been associated with academia and industry at various levels for the last 22 years, and currently he is serving as Director and Professor, at Department of Computing, Faculty of Computing and Director Campus at one of the largest campus of Shifa Tameer-e-Millat University at park Road Islamabad, Pakistan.

Previously, he has served Namal Institute Mianwali as Director (QEC) and Professor. He has served Capital University of Science and Technology, Islamabad as Professor, Associate Professor, and Assistant Professor of CS. Furthermore, he has served NESCOM, COMSATS University Islamabad, and JinTech Islamabad. He is also serving as editor-in-chief for reputed impact factor journal known as: Journal of Universal Computer Science. Dr. Afzal authored more than 135 research papers including over 70 published papers in impact factor leading journals in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Information retrieval and visualization, Semantics, Digital Libraries, and Scientometrics.

He has authored two books and has edited two books in Computer Science. His cumulative impact factor is 150+, with citations over 1,800. He played pivotal role in making collaborations between STMU-JUCS, MAJU-JUCS, MAJU-IICM, and TUG-UNIMAS. He served as PhD symposium chair, session chair, finance chair, committee member, and editor of several IEEE, ACM, Springer, Elsevier international conferences and journals. Dr. Afzal conducted more than 100 curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular activities in the last 5 years including seminars, workshops, national competitions (ExcITeCup) and invited international and national speakers from Google, Oracle, IICM, IFIS, SEGA Europe etc. Under his supervision, more than 70 post grad students (MS and PhD) have defended their research theses successfully and a number of PhD and MS students are pursuing their research with him. He served as Master trainer and a program director at a national level training for a public sector organization in Pakistan on Human Factors Engineering and conducted the training of over 150 hours for experts from the industry. He remained Head Innovations and Master trainer for a national executive development center and has trained top management of 20+ companies in the field of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. He is the recipient of multiple international research funding.