Manolescu completed his first eight classes at School no. 11 Mihai Eminescu and his secondary education at Ion Brătianu High School in Pitești.^[3] He completed his undergraduate studies and PhD at Harvard University under the direction of Peter B. Kronheimer. He was the winner of the Morgan Prize, awarded jointly by AMS-MAA-SIAM, in 2002. His undergraduate thesis was on Finite dimensional approximation in Seiberg–Witten theory, and his PhD thesis topic was A spectrum valued TQFT from the Seiberg–Witten equations.

In early 2013, he released a paper detailing a disproof of the triangulation conjecture for manifolds of dimension 5 and higher.^[4] For this paper, he received the E. H. Moore Prize from the American Mathematical Society.^[5]

He was among the recipients of the Clay Research Fellowship (2004–2008).

In 2012, he was awarded one of the ten prizes of the European Mathematical Society for his work on low-dimensional topology, and particularly for his role in the development of combinatorial Heegaard Floer homology.^[6]

He was elected as a member of the 2017 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to Floer homology and the topology of manifolds".^[7]

In 2018, he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Rio de Janeiro.

In 2020, he received a Simons Investigator Award.^[8] The citation reads: "Ciprian Manolescu works in low-dimensional topology and gauge theory. His research is centered on constructing new versions of Floer homology and applying them to questions in topology. With collaborators, he showed that many Floer-theoretic invariants are algorithmically computable. He also developed a new variant of Seiberg-Witten Floer homology, which he used to prove the existence of non-triangulable manifolds in high dimensions."

He has one of the best records ever in mathematical competitions:

• He holds the sole distinction of writing three perfect papers at the International Mathematical Olympiad: Toronto, Canada (1995); Bombay, India (1996); Mar del Plata, Argentina (1997).^[9]
• Manolescu is a three-time Putnam Fellow, having placed in the top five in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition in 1997, 1998, and 2000.^[10]

• Manolescu, Ciprian (2016). "Pin(2)-equivariant Seiberg–Witten Floer homology and the Triangulation Conjecture". J. Amer. Math. Soc. 29: 147–176. arXiv:1303.2354. doi:10.1090/jams829. S2CID 16403004.
• Manolescu, Ciprian; Ozsváth, Peter; Sarkar, Sucharit (2009). "A Combinatorial Description of Knot Floer Homology". Annals of Mathematics. Second Series. 169 (2): 633–660. arXiv:math/0607691. doi:10.4007/annals.2009.169.633. S2CID 15427272.
• Lipshitz, Robert; Manolescu, Ciprian; Wang, Jiajun (2008). "Combinatorial cobordism maps in hat Heegaard Floer theory". Duke Math. J. 145 (2): 207–247. arXiv:math/0611927. doi:10.1215/00127094-2008-050. S2CID 15351034.

• Manolescu's Stanford Page
• The Clay Mathematics Institute page Archived September 29, 2018, at the Wayback Machine
• Ciprian Manolescu's results at International Mathematical Olympiad
• Ciprian Manolescu publications indexed by Google Scholar  
• Ciprian Manolescu publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)