Hector Zenil received his bachelor’s degree in math from the National University of Mexico (UNAM), his master's degree in logic from the Sorbonne in Paris, and his PhD in computer science from the University of Lille 1, France (2011). After graduation, he did postdoctoral research at the Behavioural and Evolutionary Theory Lab of the University of Sheffield in the UK. He currently conducts research in information theory and computational biology at the Unit of Computational Medicine of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, working on cutting-edge applications of complexity science to genomics and network biology.

He is also the head of the Algorithmic Nature Group (the lab responsible for the Online Algorithmic Complexity Calculator and the Human Randomness Generation Project), co-director of the French-based lab LABORES For the Natural and Digital Sciences, and senior research associate and consultant for Wolfram Research (the creators of Mathematica).

He has held various visiting positions in the US. He was a visiting scholar in 2008 at Carnegie Mellon University and in 2007 at MIT, associated with the NASA Mars Gravity Biosatellite project. In 2012, he was invited to become a member of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee in the UK and was accepted to Mexico's SNI (a distinguished list of appointed national researchers).

He is the editor of the books Randomness Through Computation (World Scientific), A Computable Universe (World Scientific, with a foreword by Sir Roger Penrose), and Irreducibility and Computational Equivalence (Springer, with a foreword by Greg Chaitin and an afterword by Cris Calude).

He has been a reviewer for Computing Reviews since 2003, and has written over 40 book and paper reviews.