Troels Harmark received his PhD from the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen in August 2001. In September 2001 he joined the String Theory group at Harvard University that had granted him a postdoctoral fellowship. In September 2003 he started an Assistant Professor position at the High-Energy Theory and Theoretical Cosmology group at the Niels Bohr Institute payed by a 3-year grant from the Danish Research Foundation, and subsequently he continued a new 3-year grant from the Carlsberg Foundation as Research Associate Professor. He joined Nordita in October 2009 for a 5-year Assistant Professor position.

Troels' research is focused on aspects of black holes, string theory and the AdS/CFT correspondence. He has made various contributions to the field of higher-dimensional black holes, including the characterization of them and finding a new effective description of black holes that also has applications to the study of various types of phase transitions in strongly coupled quantum field theories via the AdS/CFT correspondence. He has a long-standing independent research programme devoted to finding a quantum mechanical description of black holes via the AdS/CFT correspondence. Finally, he has made contributions to the field of integrability of the spectrum of strings in the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Currently Troels has several active collaborations with scientists in Barcelona, Copenhagen, Crete, Durham, Perugia and Stockholm. In particular he has a strong connection to the High-Energy Theory group at the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen. He is a co-organizer of the 2012 Nordita workshop program "The Holographic Way: String Theory, Gauge Theory and Black Holes".