Nicholas Mark Harrison was born in Streetly, Sutton Coldfield, in the United Kingdom. His father was a manager at Lloyds Bank. He took a degree in physics at University College London and the University of Birmingham after which he was appointed as a research scientist at Daresbury Laboratory, spending a year in 1993 as a  visiting scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In 1994 he was appointed head of the Computational Materials Science Group at Daresbury Laboratory. In 2000 he became the Professor of Computational Materials Science at Imperial College London. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2004 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2008.   He is currently a co-director of the Institute for Molecular Science and Engineering at Imperial College London.