Since his first interest in robotics when he was ten, Dellaert has attended the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, from 1984 to 1989 and received an academic engineering degree (Burg.

He attended the Case Western Reserve University from 1993 to 1995 and received a master's degree in computer science and engineering.

In 1995 he began studying at Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked as a research assistant and received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2001.

In 2005 Dellaert received a $90K NSF CAREER award for "Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods for Large Scale Correspondence Problems in Computer Vision and Robotics.

As a recipient of the grant, Dellaert will research basic digital geographics that are expected to advance the state of the art, such as the 4-D Cities project.