Henry F. Schaefer III was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He attended public schools in Syracuse (New York), Menlo Park (California), and Grand Rapids (Michigan), graduating from East Grand Rapids High School. He received his B.S. degree in chemical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ph.D. degree in chemical physics from Stanford University. For 18 years he served as a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. During the 1979-1980 academic year he was also Wilfred T. Doherty Professor of Chemistry and inaugural Director of the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Texas, Austin. Since 1987 Dr. Schaefer has been Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia. In 2004 he became Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. His other academic appointments include Professeur d'Echange at the University of Paris (1977), Gastprofessur at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochshule (ETH), Zürich (1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010), David P. Craig Visiting Professor at the Australian National University (1999), and Visiting Professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016).

His research involves the use of state-of-the-art computational hardware and theoretical methods to solve important problems in molecular quantum mechanics.