Garik Israelian has completed his PhD in 1993 in Armenia. He worked as a lecturer and researcher in Utrecht (Netherlands), Brussels (Belgium), and Sydney (Australia). Since 1997 he has worked at the Institute of Astrophysics, Canary Islands (IAC). Israelian has published scientific articles on subjects ranging from the discovery of extrasolar planets planets to the properties of low mass x-ray binaries with black holes and neutron stars.

From 2001 to 2003 he gave 30 hours post-graduate course on Radiation Transfer, Stellar Atmospheres and Spectroscopy at the Universities of Tokyo (Japan) and Geneva (Switzerland). In 2011, Garik Israelian has founded the Starmus Festival which was awarded the title of “ The Best Science Festival in the World” at the international congress of Science Festivals in Shanghai (2018). Nominated by Swiss Academy of Sciences, Michel Mayor (Co-laureate of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics) and Nuno Santos were awarded the 2010 Victor Ambartsumian International Prize for Astrophysics, Physics or Mathematics. In 2014, Israelian received The Canary Islands Gold Medal awarded by the Government of Canary Islands. On 20 June 2016 the International Astronomical Union and the Minor Planet Center officially renamed asteroid 21057(1991 GJ8) to Garik Israelian in honor of Israelian. The citation was written by astronomer Joel Parker and Queen guitarist Brian May, and presented by them at the Starmus Festival III.