Claudiu Gradinaru was born in Bacau, Romania. He graduated from the University of Bucharest in Romania with a B.Sc. degree in Physics in 1995. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in Physics in 2001 from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in The Netherlands. 

In 2006 Claudiu Gradinaru started as Assistant Professor in Physics (tenure-track) at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) in the Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences (CPS). He obtained tenure and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2011, and then was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 2018. After serving as Associate Chair for one year, he led the department of CPS as Chair between 2014 and 2019. He also served in various governance roles at UTM, such as the Campus Affairs Committee and the Capital Projects and Space Allocation Committee.

The Gradinaru Lab at UTM specializes in single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy and quantitative measurements of biological molecules with nanometer accuracy and on time scales from picoseconds to hours. His research focuses on studying the conformational dynamics and interaction kinetics of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). Claudiu Gradinaru published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers, which have received more than 3500 citations, in top interdisciplinary journals such as PNAS, JACS, Nature Communications, Biophysical Journal, Journal of Physical Chemistry, eLife, Scientific Reports, etc. His research has been funded from federal (NSERC, CFI) and provincial (Ontario Centre of Innovation) sources, and he has collaborated with several industrial partners and with Canadian and international academia.

For his research accomplishments, Claudiu Gradinaru received the 2022 Desmond Morton Research Excellence Award.