Hartmut Zabel received his doctorate in 1978 from the LM University of Munich in the field of physics on a topic in condensed matter physics. He then spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Houston, Texas, and joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1979 as Assistant Professor, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1983 and Full Professor of Physics in 1986. In 1989 he received a call to the Ruhr University Bochum and held the chair for experimental physics/condensed matter physics from 1989 to 2012. He maintained his connection to the University of Illinois as Adjunct Professor of Physics. In 2001 he received an honorary doctorate from the KTH in Stockholm. After his retirement in 2012, he was first a Senior Professor at the Ruhr University and from 2014 to 2018 Distinguished Guest Professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.