After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, he attended the City College of New York, where he received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1951.

After two years, Zabusky decided to leave engineering and pursued a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, which he received in 1959 with a thesis in the area of stability of flowing magnetized plasmas.

The use of computer simulations led Zabusky to an appreciation of the importance of appropriate visualization and quantification as a tool in analyzing fluid dynamical and wave systems.

[7] In 1988, he left Pittsburgh to become the State of New Jersey Professor of Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Rutgers University in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

[9] In 1983, while in the Soviet Union in conjunction with an invitation to an international scientific conference, he was expelled from the country for meeting with dissident Jewish scientists.