Hal Schenck received a BS in Applied Math and Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1986. From 1986 to 1990 he served as an Army officer in Georgia and Germany, then returned to graduate school at Cornell, earning his Ph.D. in 1997. After an NSF postdoc at Harvard and Northeastern, he was a professor at Texas A&M (2001–2007), at the University of Illinois (2007–2017), and Chair at Iowa State (2017–2019). Since 2019 he has been the Rosemary Kopel Brown Eminent Scholars Chair at Auburn University. He has earned teaching awards from Cornell and Illinois, and awards for departmental leadership and outreach to student veterans from Iowa State. He was elected as a fellow of the AMS in 2020, and as a fellow of the AAAS in 2023; recent academic visits include a Leverhulme Professorship at Oxford, and a Clare Hall Fellowship at Cambridge. His research is at the interface of algebra, geometry, and computation.