He completed a bachelor's degree in engineering physics at the University of British Columbia in 1978, followed by his master's and doctorate in applied physics at the California Institute of Technology.
[1][2] From 1982 to 1995, he was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.
[3] Since 1995, he has taught at Carnegie Mellon University,[1] where he conducts research in semiconductors.
[4] Feenstra is a fellow of the American Vacuum Society, and was the 1989 recipient of its Peter Mark Memorial Award.
[2] He was elected to fellowship of the American Physical Society in 1997, "[f]or contributions to the development of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope as a spectroscopic tool to probe semiconductor surfaces and surface phenomena,"[5] and was awarded the APS Davisson–Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics in 2019, "[f]or pioneering developments of the techniques and concepts of spectroscopic scanning tunneling microscopy.