He served as the chair of the Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

[1] Khanin received his PhD from the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics in Moscow and continued working there as a Research Associate until 1994.

Khanin was an invited speaker at the European Congress of Mathematics in Barcelona in 2000.

[3] He held the Jean-Morlet Chair at the Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques in 2017, and he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018 in Rio de Janeiro.

In 2021 he was awarded The Humboldt Prize, also known as the Humboldt Research Award, in recognition of his lifetime's research achievements.