A native of Stockholm, Tegmark left Sweden in 1990 with undergraduate degrees in economics and physics.

After grad school in Berkeley and postdocs in Munich and Princeton, he began his faculty career at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to MIT in 2004, where he is currently a Professor. His over 200 publications span a broad range of topics, ranging from theories and measurements of the evolution of the universe to foundational questions in gravitation and quantum mechanics. Awards for his research include a Packard Fellowship, a Cottrell Scholar Award, and an NSF Career Award. His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine's "Breakthrough of the Year: 2003."