Haier is a professor emeritus in the Pediatric Neurology Division of the School of Medicine at University of California, Irvine.
He has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University where he studied personally and individual differences with Robert Hogan and with Julian Stanley on the Study of Mathematically and Scientifically Precocious Youth.
Following his PhD from Hopkins in 1975, he was a Staff Fellow at NIMH with David Rosenthal and worked on data from the Denmark Adoption Studies of schizophrenia.
[1] In 1994, he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", an editorial written by the American psychologist Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal, which was presented as a summary of findings from intelligence research, especially as they related to issues raised in The Bell Curve.
[2] He has worked with Rex Jung on the parieto-frontal integration theory (P-FIT) which uses neuro-imaging to examine the neuroscience of intelligence.