Hashem Akbari was born on August 13, 1949, in Iran.

He is an Iranian-American professor of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. He received his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1979 and became a U.S. citizen in 1991. In 2009, he joined Concordia University, where he founded a comprehensive laboratory to measure solar spectral reflectance and thermal emittance of common construction materials. Prior to joining Concordia University, he was a senior scientist and the leader of the Heat Island Group at the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) at the University of California (from 1983 to 2009). In 1985, he founded the Urban Heat Island (UHI) group, where he worked in the areas of heat-island quantification, mitigation, and novel techniques in the analysis of energy use in buildings and industry in the United States and abroad. He contributed to the development of several international standards and was the author of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (2007 Nobel Peace Prize). Akbari is one of the founding organizers of the Global Cool Cities Alliance (vice Chairman of the Board, Technical committee chair), the Cool Roof Rating Council (CRRC) (Ex-Officio Board Member, International Committee Chair), and the European Cool Roof Council (ECPR) (Ex-Officio Board Member).