Dmitri Kharzeev was educated at Moscow State University; he received his PhD in particle and nuclear physics there in 1990. He then spent two postdoctoral years in the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics, three years in the Theory Division at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and a year at Bielefeld University in Germany. In 1997 he joined the newly created RIKEN-BNL Research Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory under direction of Prof. T.D. Lee, a Nobel laureate. In 2000 he became a Scientist with tenure at BNL; he had been the head of the Nuclear Theory group there from 2004 till 2010. Under his leadership the BNL group has become the highest ranked nuclear theory group in the US National laboratories system. Since 2007, he has also been an adjunct professor at Yale University. In 2010, Kharzeev has become a Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University where he directs the Center for Quantum Materials; he also continues to hold the Senior scientist appointment at BNL, where he is the Head of the RIKEN-BNL Theory group.