Schnabel was born in
Queens, New York. He earned his
A.B. degree in
mathematics from
Dartmouth College in 1971. From 1973 to 1977, Schnabel studied
computer science at the
Cornell University, receiving his
M.S. degree in 1975 and
Ph.D. degree in 1977. Schnabel joined the faculty of the
University of Colorado Boulder as an
assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science in 1977. He remained at CU-Boulder for 30 years, becoming
associate in 1980 and then
full professor in 1988, chair of the Department of Computer Science in 1990, associate dean for academic affairs of the College of Engineering in 1995 and vice provost for academic and campus computing and chief information officer in 1998. Schnabel was founding director of the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. Schnabel was
Dean and Professor of the
School of Informatics and Computing at
Indiana University, a position he held from 2007 to 2015. Schnabel was a co-founder and director for 1997–2007 for the
National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), and a co-founder of the Alliance for the Advancement of African-American Researchers in Computing, Schnabel also served on the advisory committee for the
National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (NSF CISE), starting in 2012. Schnabel's research interests include
numerical computation, numerical solution of unconstrained and constrained optimization problems, solution of systems of nonlinear equations, and nonlinear least squares. He has served as editor-in-chief of
SIAM Review and as associate editor of several journals, including
SIAM Journal on Optimization,
Mathematical Programming A,
Mathematical Programming B and
Operations Research Letters. ==Honors and awards==