He is a class of 1986 graduate of the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West.
He obtained his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1997 under Robert Benny Gerber [3] and Ofer Biham, with a thesis entitled Structural Characterization of Disordered Systems.
He moved to the University of Southern California in 2005, where he is a professor of electrical engineering, chemistry, and physics.
He is listed as one of the top 20 authors of the decade 2000–2009 in Quantum Computing by Thomson Reuters' Sciencewatch.
Lidar's research in quantum information processing has focused primarily on methods for overcoming decoherence.