Prof. Ariel Dervasi was born in Chile and immigrated to Israel at the age of 10. Ariel completed all his degrees at the Hebrew University: B.Sc. in biology and computer science, a master's degree and doctorate in genetics. In 1999, after a post-doctoral studies at the University of Paris, he returned to Israel, and joined the staff of the Hebrew University.

At the university he served as head of the Department of Genetics, head of the biology teaching program, and as vice dean of teaching at the Faculty of Mathematics & Sciences.

During his Ph.D. and postdoctoral studies he focused mainly on mapping quantitative properties in mice and published a summary of the mapping approaches as a single author in the most prestigious Genetics journal - Nature Genetics. As a faculty member, he studied mainly with the mapping of complex human diseases. Among other things, he focused on mapping genetic changes related to common diseases such as schizophrenia and diabetes. In addition, he developed genetic methods that assist the police in forensic identification. Recently he developed a theory that explains human behavior in accordance with evolutionary theory. Ariel published his book on this theory, called Boss Theory, just before his death.
Over the years he has published over 100 articles, cited over 14,000 times.