Dr. Victor Najjar graduated from the Medical School of the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1935. He trained at Johns Hopkins University and remained on the faculty there until 1957. From 1957 to 1968, Najjar was professor and chair of the Department of Microbiology at Vanderbilt. In 1968 he became professor of Molecular Biology at the Massachusetts Division of the American Cancer Society and ACS Professor of Molecular Biology and Microbiology at Tufts Medical School in 1984. He returned to Vanderbilt in the early 1990s and held an appointment in the Department of Pediatrics until 1998.

In 1952, at Johns Hopkins, Najjar and John Crigler published a report of a defect in bilirubin glucuronidation that bears theri name. In Crigler-Najjar syndrome, intense jaundice appears in the first days of life and persists thereafter.