Franco Nori earned his BS degree from Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela in 1982, and his MS and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA in 1983 and 1987 respectively. After a postdoc at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, now KITP, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Nori joined the University of Michigan in 1990, where he is today a research scientist. He is also Team Leader for the Quantum Information Physics Theory Research Team, Quantum Computing Center, RIKEN, Japan, and Chief Scientist in the Theoretical Quantum Physics Lab at RIKEN.

His research group has done pioneering interdisciplinary studies at the interface between quantum optics, quantum electronics, quantum information, nanoscience, optomechanics, dissipative quantum open systems, superconducting quantum circuitry for quantum computing, photonics, atomic physics with quantum circuits, computational physics, and condensed matter physics.

He has been listed by the Web of Science as a "Highly Cited Researcher” in Physics (covering all areas of Physics) for the past seven consecutive years: from 2017 to 2023 (Less than 0.1% of physicists are selected). According to the Web of Science: >65K citations and h-index > 117 (Google Scholar: > 92K citations and h-index >134).

He is a Fellow of Optica, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Physics. He is also an elected Member of the Academia Europaea, the Latin American Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Swedish Royal Society of Arts and Sciences, in Gothenburg, Sweden. Nori has received several awards including the W.E. Lamb Medal, the Matsuo Foundation's Prize for Research in Physics and the Prize for Science, by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. In 2024, he received Optica’s Charles Hard Townes Medal, “For his many fundamental contributions to quantum optics, quantum information processing, and quantum circuits, and for the development of key quantum software tools.”