A native of The Netherlands, Professor Lewin received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Delft (1965). In 1966, he came to MIT as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Physics and was invited to join the faculty as an Assistant Professor later that same year. He was promoted to Associate Professor of Physics in 1968 and to full Professor in 1974.

Professor Lewin's honors and awards include the NASA Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (1978), twice recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Award (1984 and 1991), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984), MIT's Science Council Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1984) and the W. Buechner Teaching Prize of the MIT Department of Physics (1988). In 1997, he was the recipient of a NASA Group Achievement Award for the Discovery of the Bursting Pulsar.

He is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (elected 1993), Fellow of the American Physical Society.

In the seventies and eighties Lewin collaborated with the artists Otto Piene (born in Germany), who was for many years the Director of MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and with Peter Struycken (Dutch) who is one of the leading computer artists in the world.