He served as the founding director of the Institute for Materials Science (IMS) at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2014–2017.

[citation needed] He then moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory as an Oppenheimer Fellow.

As an acting chief scientist and as a theory thrust leader he was actively involved in bringing up the Center of Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT)[1] and building an active theory program at CINT.

In 2011 Balatsky was appointed as a professor of theoretical condensed matter physics at Nordita in Stockholm.

Balatsky recently worked on anomalous mechanical properties of solid He4[6][7] as an alternative explanation of supersolidity seen in torsional oscillator experiments,[8][9] on theory of Heavy Fermions,[10] and on electronic and structural properties of DNA and Graphene hybrid structures[11][12] Balatsky and collaborators predicted the existence of the impurity induced resonances in d-wave superconductors that can serve as markers of unconventional superconductivity,[13] and Impurity-induced states in conventional and unconventional superconductors.