Al L Efros earned his Ph.D. from the Leningrad Technological Institute. He became a scientist at the Ioffe Institute in Leningrad. During his time there, he and Alexei Ekimov, Vavilov State Optical Institute, were able to demonstrate the optical properties of semiconductor crystals which led to the discovery of quantum dots. In 1990, he moved to the Technical University of Munich. He then served as a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for one year before becoming an advisor the US Naval Research Laboratory.

His work in quantum dots has been widely recognized, including the Alexander von Humboldt Prize and OSA’s R. W. Wood Prize.