Helmut Katzgraber earned a diploma in physics from ETH Zurich and his master’s degree and Ph.D. in physics at the University of California Santa Cruz. After postdoc positions at the University of California Davis and ETH Zurich, he was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation professorship. In 2009, he joined Texas A&M University as an assistant professor and became a full-time professor in 2015. Katzgraber joined Microsoft as a principal research manager in 2018 before joining Amazon in 2020.