Helmut Katzgraber earned a diploma in physics from the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH Zurich) and his master’s degree and doctorate 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, Katzgraber joined Texas A&M University as an assistant professor, receiving a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program Award in 2011. In 2015 he became a full professor before moving full-time to industry in 2018. After two years leading quantum solutions as principal research manager at Microsoft, he joined Amazon Web Services in 2020 and is now the global practice lead (quantum) of the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab. In 2021 Katzgraber was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society for his contributions towards leveraging physics-based algorithms for industrial applications. He has published extensively in the areas of computational physics, quantum computing, algorithms, optimization, and glassy systems.