Effariza Hanafi received the B.Eng. in Telecommunications (first class honours) from the University of Adelaide, Adelaide, S.A., Australia, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2010 and 2014, respectively. She joined the Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where she is now a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Engineering. She is actively involved in research as a principal investigator and has secured research grants from Fundamental Research Grants Scheme (MOE, Malaysia) and internal research grants in Universiti Malaya. She has published more than 40 journal papers in ISI-indexed publications and refereed conference papers. She is an active reviewer for numerous high-quality journals such as IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Access and several international conferences such as IEEE Global Communications Conference. 

 She is currently a Senior Member for IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). She was the recipient of the MARA Scholarship for undergraduate study, and the Codan Achievement Prize in 2010. She was also the recipient of Scholarship from the Ministry of Higher Education and University of Malaya, Malaysia for her doctoral studies, and the best student poster presentation at the Australian Communications Theory Workshop (AusCTW) 2013. In 2015, she was the recipient of the University of Malaya Excellence Awards. She was an awardee for financial support from Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) for AUN/SEED-Net Regional Conference on Computer and Information Engineering (RCCIE) 2018. 

 Her main research interests span widely across the area of Internet of Things (system integration, smart system), wireless communication (5G networks, channel characterization, cooperative and distributed communications, non-orthogonal multiple access), RF technologies (PCB fabrication, UHF RFID tag antenna) and optical communications (fiber laser and sensor).