Robert H. Austin received his B.A. in Physics from Hope College in Holland MI and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in 1976. He was a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry from 1976-1979 and has been at Princeton University in the Department from Physics from 1979 to the present, achieving the rank of Professor of Physics in 1989.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences USA. He has served as a President of the Division of Biological Physics of the American Physical Society, and is the present Chair of the U.S. Liaison Committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He has served as the biological physics editor for Physical Review Letters, serves on numerous review panels for NIH, NSF, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and NIST, and is the Editor of the Virtual Journal of Biological Physics. He won the 2005 Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society.