Simon Billinge earned his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, following a BA at Oxford University. He spent 2 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as a post-doc before joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University in 1994. In 2008 he took up his current position as Professor of Applied Physics, Applied Mathematics, and Materials Science at Columbia University and Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Simon Billinge has published more than 300 papers in scholarly journals. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Neutron Scattering Society of America, a former Fulbright and Sloan fellow, and has earned a number of awards including being honoured in 2011 for contributions to the nation as an immigrant by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the 2025 Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the 2020 Distinguished Powder Diffraction Prize of the European Powder Diffraction Conference, the 2018 Warren Award of the American Crystallographic Association, the 2010 J. D. Hanawalt Award of the International Center for Diffraction Data, the University Distinguished Faculty Award at Michigan State, and the Thomas H. Osgood Undergraduate Teaching Award. He is Section Editor of Acta Crystalographica Section A: Advances and Foundations. He regularly chairs and participates in reviews of major facilities and federally funded programs.