[1][2] After studies at the Universities of Freiburg and Hamburg Frank Natterer in 1968 earned his PhD with a thesis "Einschließungen für die großen Eigenwerte gewöhnlicher Differentialgleichungen zweiter und vierter Ordnung"[3] under the supervision of Prof. Lothar Collatz.

He was Director of the "Institut für Numerische und instrumentelle Mathematik" of the Westfälische Wilhelms Universität, Münster, Germany, from 1981 until he retired from active teaching in 2006.

[4] In 2002, he received an honorary doctorate at Universität des Saarlandes in recognition of his leading role and achievements in the field of mathematical methods in imaging.

He was member of the Committee on the Mathematics and Physics of Emerging Dynamic Biomedical Imaging of the National Research Council of the USA.

[15] Natterer has organized numerous conferences on the topics of inverse problems and on the mathematical methods of computed tomography.