Soper received his bachelor's degree in 1965 from
Amherst College, and his PhD in 1971 under
James Bjorken at
Stanford University, where he worked with
John Kogut. From 1971 to 1973 Soper was an instructor, and from 1973 to 1977 an assistant professor at
Princeton University. He was appointed in 1977–80 an assistant professor, in 1980–83 an associate professor, and from 1983 to the present a professor at the
University of Oregon, where from 2004 to 2007 he was chair of the physics department. His doctoral dissertation on
Null Plane Field Theory dealt with the theory of high energy scattering processes in the
parton model. With
George Sterman and
John C. Collins, he proved a factorization theorem in perturbative
quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Soper is a member of the "Coordinated Theoretical-Experimental Project on QCD" (CTEQ), whose co-spokesperson he was from 2001 to 2004. He was on the editorial board of
Physical Review Letters and
Physical Review D. == Honors ==