After his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1925, he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories in radio frequency communication, where he wrote several patents.

He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1932 on the quantum theory of transport processes,[2] advised by George Uhlenbeck.

[7] After his PhD he left for a ten-month collaboration with Werner Heisenberg in the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Leipzig University.

[2] During World War II, Uehling was recruited as a member of the antisubmarine warfare operations research group of the Tenth Fleet.

He was awarded the President's Certificate of Merit by the United States government in early 1947 for his scientific contributions to the team during the war.