Born in West Lafayette Indiana in 1963, Federspiel earned a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1991, where he led the first self-consistent [1] measurement of the electric and magnetic polarizability of the proton.

In 1993, he married his wife, Carey Mills, with whom he has four children, Harry, Ella, Erin, and Leo.

A Baritone Sax enthusiast, he played in professor John Garvey's Jazz band for seven years.

[2] In 1997 he joined BiosGroup, and then in 1999 founded e-Xchange Advantage Corporation (e-XA) to deploy technology allowing institutional traders to control the information released to the market about their orders.

In 2020 Fred joined AlgoCortex LLC to improve the efficiency of the trading process through intelligent automation and preserve the hard-earned assets of institutional investors and their clients.