He received his Bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley in 2006 and his PhD from MIT in 2011, after which he started his position at Caltech. He is the recipient of a 2013 NSF CAREER Award and a 2015 ONR Young Investigator Award. Austin Minnich also runs the minnichlab (http://minnich.caltech.edu/index.html ) which focuses on understanding and engineering nanoscale heat transport for applications in the energy field like thermoelectric waste heat recovery.