Hanspeter Pfister received his master's degree in 1991 in electrical engineering at ETH Zurich and moved to the United States for his PhD in computer science at Stony Brook University.

In 1992 he began working with Arie Kaufman on Cube-3, a hardware architecture for volume visualization.

By the time of his graduation in 1996, he had finished the architecture for Cube-4 and licensed it to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories.

In the same year, he also served as the Technical Papers Chair at SIGGRAPH[5] and became a consultant for Disney Research[6] From 2013 to 2017, Hanspeter Pfister was the director of the Institute for Applied Computational Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

As of Dec 2019, according to Google Scholar,[12] Hanspeter Pfister's most cited publications are: A complete list of Hanspeter Pfister's publications can be found on his research group's website.