Daniel Chemla was born in Tunisa in 1940. He earned his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Paris. He worked as a member of technical staff at the Centre National d’Etudes des Télécommunications after completing his degree until 1981 when he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in the United States. In 1991, he moved to the University of California Berkeley as Professor of Physics and Director of the material Sciences Division. In 1998, he was made Director of the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He stepped down from the Materials Science Division in 2003 and the Advanced Light Source in 2005, but maintained a lab group later.

Chemla was elected as a Fellow of OSA in 1989. He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.  He received OSA’s R.W. Wood prize in 1988, and in 1995 he received the IEEE/LEOS Quantum Electronics Award and a Humboldt Research Award.  In 2005, on the occasion of his 65th birthday, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Cachan, France. In that same year, the journal Chemical Physics published a special issue entitled "Molecular Nanoscience — In honor of Daniel S. Chemla on his 65th birthday."