His family left Hungary in response to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - he later recalled a dramatic escape over the border to Austria - and immigrated to Canada, settling in Montreal.
Szabo accompanied Karplus on a sabbatical in Paris in 1972, and then spent a year in Cambridge working jointly with David Buckingham and Max Perutz.
Among the resulting work on NMR relaxation, the Lipari-Szabo model-free formalism for modeling the dynamics of molecules was most influential and remains in active use in the field.
[2] As he later recalled, his Ph.D. advisor Karplus connected him with Bill Eaton at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, who recruited Szabo to NIDDK.
His research group currently works on developing theoretical models of single-molecule experiments,[1] including collaborations with Irina Gopich and Gerhard Hummer.