Mansoor Sheik-Bahae earned his BS and MS degrees from Catholic University of America and his Ph.D. from State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. He served at CREOL at the University of Central Florida until 1994. That year, he moved to the University of New Mexico, where he is currently Distinguished Professor in the departments of Physics and Astronomy.

He is a Fellow of OSA and recipient of the 2012 R.W. Wood Prize “for invention, implementation and development of “Z-scan:” a simple and effective method to measure cubic and higher order optical nonlinearities.”