Sergiu Klainerman was born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1950. He received his Ph.D. from New York University and was a Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1978 to 1980. He was assistant, associate, and full professor at New York University from 1980 to 1987. Since 1987 he has been a full professor at Princeton University.
He has held visiting positions at various institutions in the US and also in France, Israel, Germany, England, Switzerland, Japan, China etc. In 1996-1997, he held the position of Blaise Pascal International Chair at Université de Paris VI.
Klainerman's honors include a MacArthur Fellowship; Miller, Sloan and Guggenheim Fellowships; the Le Conte Prize of the French Academy of Sciences; and the Bôcher prize of the American Mathematical Society.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the French Academy of Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research interests are partial differential equations of mathematical physics and their connections to Fourier analysis and geometry. In recent years he has devoted most of his attention to General Relativity.