Nathan Babcock completed his undergraduate degree in Honours Physics at the University of Waterloo in 2005, where he built components for X-ray diffraction experiments in the Waterloo Soft Matter research group. After developing algorithms for quantum state purification at the Institute for Quantum Computing, he wrote his undergraduate thesis on quantum heat engines at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He completed his doctorate at the University of Calgary where he carried out research in molecular biology and quantum information processing. He has since held postdoctoral positions at Simon Fraser University (BC), Exeter University (UK), and Howard University in Washington, DC.