Khalil Sima'an obtained his PhD in Computational Linguistics from Utrecht University. He was a postdoctoral fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences (KNAW) before joining the ILLC-UvA as assistant professor in 2003, and became associate professor at ILLC-UvA in 2011, and full professor by the summer of 2014. 

Khalil was a visiting researcher, among others, at University of Maryland (2002), Johns Hopkins University (summer workshops 2005) and CNGL at Dublin City University (frequently 2003-2011). He is also a laureate of the Vidi (2006) and Vici (2013) personal funding competitions of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). He serve(d) on the Editorial Boards of Machine Translation  and  Journal of Natural Language Engineering, on the Standing Elite Reviewer committee for TACL, as Advisory Board member for John Benjamins Publishers' book series on Natural Language Processing, co-opted member of the EAMT Executive Committee (2012-2022), as PC Chair for MT Summit XIV (2013) and International Conference on Parsing Technologies (2013), and as tutorial co-chair for EMNLP 2015 and area chair syntax and parsing for ACL 2010.