Harris was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Harvard University with bachelor's degree in 1956, master's degree in 1959, and PhD in experimental solid state physics from Horst Meyer in 1962.
[2][3] Harris was in 1961/62 at Duke University to complete his doctoral thesis with Meyer and then was an instructor there from 1962 to 1964.
During 1961–1964 at Duke University Harris retrained himself as a theorist in condensed matter physics and then spent the academic year 1964/65 as a researcher working with John Hubbard in the UK at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (Harwell Laboratory) near Harwell, Oxfordshire.
[2] In 2007 he received the Lars Onsager Prize for his contributions to the statistical physics of disordered systems, especially for the development of the Harris criterion.
Upon receiving the Lars Onsager Prize, Harris wrote in 2007: My interests have included orientational ordering in solid molecular hydrogen (some with H. Meyer), critical properties of numerous random systems (often in collaboration with T. C. Lubensky), the crystal structure and dynamics of fullerenes (often with T. Yildirim), spin dynamics of frustrated magnets (with A. J. Berlinsky and more recently with A. Aharony, O. Entin-Wohlman, and T. Yildirim) and the symmetry properties of frustrated magnets which exhibit simultaneous magnetic and ferroelectric ordering.
[2]He has also collaborated in theoretical condensed matter physics with R. J. Birgeneau (MIT), J. Yeomans (Oxford), R. D. Kamien (Penn), C. Broholm (Johns Hopkins), and A. Ramirez (Bell Labs).
[4] In 1973 he developed at Oxford the Harris criterion,[5][6] which indicates the extent to which the critical exponents of a phase transition are modified by a small amount of randomness (e.g., defects, dislocations, or impurities).
and thus the Harris criterion is satisfied, while the three-dimensional Ising model has