Vahakn N. Dadrian received his undergraduate and graduate education in Europe at the University of Berlin (mathematics), the University of Vienna (history) and the University of Zürich (international law). His training in the United States was in the social sciences, culminating with a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.

His academic background includes affiliations with Harvard University as a Research Fellow, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Guest Professor and Duke University as a Visiting Professor.

In the last fifteen years he has lectured extensively in French, English and German in European universities, among them the Free University of Berlin, the Universities of Munich, Parma, Torino, Zürich and Uppsala. In 1991, he was a guest lecturer at the Universities of Frankfurt am Main, Cologne, Bochum and Münster.

He has given a series of lectures at the Universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht in the Netherlands (1993-1994), the Universities of Geneva and Brussels (1996 and 1998) and UNESCO’s Paris centre (1999).

Professor Dadrian was the first Armenian scholar invited in 1995 to the British Parliament, House of Commons, to deliver a lecture commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. On the occasion of the same anniversary, the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia awarded him an honorary doctorate degree for his seminal contribution to the field of Armenian Genocide Studies. In October 1998,through a special ceremony, he was inducted into the ranks of the same Academy. At the same time, he was decorated by the President of the Republic of Armenia with the Khorenatzi medal, the Republic's highest cultural award.

Professor Dadrian's field of specialization is genocide in general and the Armenian Genocide in particular. He has an extensive list of publications on the subject, including several articles on the Jewish Holocaust and the victimization of the American Indians.

His groundbreaking research has been supported by two large grants from the National Science Foundation, resulting in the publication of a monograph, dealing with the legal analysis of the Armenian genocide, by the Yale Journal of International Law in 1989.

After serving as Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York from 1970 to 1991, Professor Dadrian shifted his academic career to conducting research full-time on the Armenian Genocide. For several years he was engaged as Director of a large Genocide Study Project sponsored by the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation. The project’s first major achievement was the publication, now in its fourth printing, of an extensive volume titled The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Oxford & Providence, RI, 1995). Professor Dadrian's next groundbreaking work, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity, was published in April 1996 (Cambridge, MA). His third volume, Warrant for Genocide: The Key Elements of the Turko-Armenian Conflict appeared in 1999 (London & New Brunswick, NJ). His latest work is titled Key Elements in the Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide: A Case Study of Distortion and Falsification (Cambridge, MA and Toronto, 1999).

He currently is Director of Genocide Research with the Zoryan Institute. Prof. Dadrian continues to research, write, and lecture extensively on genocide theory, comparative genocide, and the Armenian Genocide.