Professor Laurent El Ghaoui graduated from École Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France) in 1985 and earned his PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University in 1990. From 1992 to 1999, he served as a faculty member at the École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (Paris, France), while also holding part-time teaching appointments at École Polytechnique within the Applied Mathematics Department and at Université de Paris-I (La Sorbonne) in the Mathematics in Economy program.

In 1999, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, as an Acting Associate Professor, receiving tenure in 2001. After a period working in the financial sector with SAC Capital Management in New York and Connecticut, he returned full-time to UC Berkeley in 2006 in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS), where he taught optimization and financial engineering courses.

Professor El Ghaoui is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Bronze Medal for Engineering Sciences from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), a CAREER award, an Okawa Research Grant, and a Google Research Grant. He is also a co-recipient of the SIAM Optimization Prize.