Professor Haiman received a Physics B.S. degree from MIT, and he attended graduate school in Cambridge, UK, and at Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1998. He was chosen as one of Popular Science Magazine's Brilliant 10 young scientists in 2002 and received the New York Academy of Sciences Blavatnik Award in 2010. He was a Hubble Fellow at Princeton and a postdoc in the theory group at Fermilab, before joining the Columbia faculty.