Samar Safi-Harb grew up in Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war. Despite loving physics in high school, Safi-Harb thought she would become a medical doctor and started a pre-medical physics undergraduate degree at the American University of Beirut. After her undergraduate degree, she chose to follow her passion in physics and pursued graduate studies in physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, receiving her MSc in 1993 and her PhD in 1997.