Prof. Billinge has more than 25 years of experience developing and  applying techniques to studying local structure in materials using x-ray,  neutron, and electron diffraction such as the development of novel data analysis incorporating graph theoretic, artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches. He earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. After 13 years as a faculty member at Michigan State University, in 2008 he took up his current position as Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University and held a joint position as a Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory between 2008 and 2022.

 Prof. Billinge has published more than 350 papers in scholarly journals. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Neutron Scattering Society of America, a former Fulbright Fellow and Sloan Fellow and has earned a number of awards, including the 2022 Distinguished Powder Diffractionist Prize of the European Powder Diffraction Conference, the 2018 Warren Award of the American Crystallographic Association and being honored in 2011 for contributions to the nation as an immigrant by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.  He is the 2025 laureate of the Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is Section Editor of Acta Crystallographica Section A: Advances and Foundations. He regularly chairs and participates in reviews of major facilities and federally funded programs.