After receiving bachelor's and master's degrees from the City College of New York, he was award his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
[2] Thereafter he joined the staff of Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he performed research on low temperature physics, solid state physics and high magnetic field superconductivity.
[4] Autler was a pioneer in the use of small superconducting solenoids with niobium wire, producing a 2.5 T field at a temperature of 4.2 K, then achieving 9.8 T at a temperature of 1.5 K.[2] He may have been the first person to create an application for superconductivity when he used this magnetic field for a solid state maser.
[6] In 1963, he was named head of the Low Temperature Physics section at the Westinghouse Research Laboratories.
[7] He was married to his wife Kaja and the couple had a daughter Lilian who graduated from Yale University.