Beatrice Alex graduated in Languages, Translation and Interpreting (French and Russian) from Heriot-Watt University and received post-graduate training in computational linguistics and speech and language processing at the University of Edinburgh. She obtained her MSc in Speech and Language Processing and her Euromasters in Speech Processing in 2002 and her PhD in automatically detecting anglicisms in French and German text in 2008. She has been based at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh as a Research Fellow for a number of years working on text mining for different applications in literature, history, biomedicine and healthcare. Since 2018, she has been Chancellor's Fellow at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures as well as Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute and the School of Informatics.

Her research focuses on text mining and natural language processing to extract information from raw text. She was part of the Palimpsest project on Mining Literary Edinburgh and is one of the core developers of the Edinburgh Geoparser. Since 2018, she has been leading the Edinburgh Language Technology Group (LTG), a research and development group working in the area of natural language engineering at the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Alex is PI or Co-I on a number of awards for text mining research.