Bảo Châu Ngô was born in Vietnam in 1972. He completed all his university studies in France. Admitted to the École normale supérieure in 1992 through the international competitive entrance examination, he then obtained a PhD under the supervision of Gérard Laumon at the Université Paris-Sud in 1997. From 1998 to 2004, he was a CNRS research fellow at the University of Paris-Nord. He then returned to Orsay as a professor. He spent three years at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study from 2007 to 2010. Since 2010, he has held a Distinguished Professorship at the University of Chicago.

Bảo Châu Ngô is known for having forged new geometric tools aimed at successfully dealing with harmonic analysis problems known as the "fundamental lemma" in the Langlands program. These successes have been crowned with numerous international awards, including the Fields Medal in 2010.