Irfan is the Head of School, School of Computing and Mathematics. Prior to entering tertiary education, Irfan worked as a computer programmer. Since 1980 Irfan has been involved in computing and computational mathematics education and research.

Before joining Charles Sturt Irfan worked at the following universities: University of Saskatchewan (Canada), Middle East Technical University (Turkey), George Washington University (USA) and the University of Queensland (Australia). Irfan's research interests are broad; he has published papers on data mining, image processing, mesh generation, multigrid algorithms and computational fluid dynamics. Irfan is involved in research projects at international and national levels in these areas.