Subir Sachdev is the Herchel Smith Professor of physics at Harvard University specialising in condensed matter. He attended college at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi for a year. He transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a B.S. in Physics. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Harvard University and held professional positions at Bell Labs (1985–1987) and at Yale University (1987–2005), where he was a Professor of Physics, before returning to Harvard.

Sachdev was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014, received the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society and the Dirac Medal from the ICTP in 2018, and was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society ForMemRS in 2023. He was a co-editor of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics from 2017 to 2019, and is Editor-in-Chief of Reports on Progress in Physics since 2022.