Shahidi graduated from the University of Tehran with a bachelor's degree in 1969. He received his Ph.D. in 1975 from Johns Hopkins University with dissertation On Gauss Sums Attached to the Pairs and the Exterior Powers of the Representations of the General Linear Groups over Finite and Local Fields with advisor Joseph Shalika.[2] As a postdoc Shahidi was for the academic year 1975–1976 at the Institute for Advanced Study and for the academic year 1976–1977 a visiting assistant professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. At Purdue University he became in 1977 an assistant professor, in 1982 an associate professor, and 1986 a full professor. There he since 2001 is a Distinguished Professor.
He returned to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1983–1984, in 1990–1991, in October–November 1999, and in several other brief visits. He has held visiting positions from 1981 to 1982 at the University of Toronto, in June 1990 at the University of Paris VII, in May 1993 and again in February 1997 as a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Kyōto University, in June–July 1993 at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, in May–June 1995 at the École normale supérieure, and at several other institutions.
A proof of Langlands conjecture on Plancherel measures; Complementary series for p-adic groups, Annals of Mathematics, Band 132, 1990, 273–330 doi:10.2307/1971524
mit H. H. Kim: Functorial products for GL(2) × GL(3) and the symmetric cube for GL(2), Annals of Mathematics, vol. 155, 2002, 837–893. doi:10.1016/S0764-4442(00)01677-3
^F. Shahidi, Eisenstein Series and Automorphic -functions, Colloquium Publications, Vol. 58, American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 2010. ISBN978-0-8218-4989-7