Dr Israelian, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (Spain), is the creative director and spiritual father of the STARMUS Festival. Since 1997, Israelian works at the IAC in Tenerife. He is a Principal Investigator of the project Observational Tests of the Processes of Nucleosynthesis in the Universe. The IAC is an international centre of astrophysics which operates the largest optical telescope in the world – Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) as well as two observatories on Tenerife and La Palma. In 1999 he led a collaboration reported in the journal Nature that found the first observational evidence that supernova explosions are responsible for the formation of black holes. His research has led to several high-profile discoveries, he has published around 500 articles with more than 10,000 citations on subjects ranging from the extrasolar planets and their parent stars, massive super-giant stars, metal-poor stars to low-mass x-ray binaries with black holes and neutron stars.

Dr Israelian has spoken at dozens of professional conferences, including TED Global. He was awarded the 2010 Ambartsumian Prize for Astrophysics, Physics or Mathematics, along with Michel Mayor and Nuno Santos, for the studies of extrasolar planets and their parent stars. In June 2016, he appeared on Larry King Now with Stephen Hawking to discuss the Starmus Festival and extrasolar planets.