Kamran Behnia grew up in Tehran and witnessed the revolution of 1979, and the repression which followed it. He became a political refugee in France in the middle of the 1980s and obtained a PhD from Paris-Sud University in 1990. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Geneva, he was employed in 1992 by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) as a junior researcher in the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides at Orsay, near Paris. He moved to his current institution (ESPCI) in 2000 and has been doing research there since. He is an experimentalist interested in the collective behaviour of electrons, and in particular in the way they carry heat and charge.