Chris Nagele was born in Philadelphia, where he attended Haverford College, receiving degrees in physics and astronomy. He then worked for two years at New York CIty University (NYU) Shanghai and NYU performing simulations of quantum systems, particularly the Lattice Schwinger Model. He then began the graduate program under the supervision of Professor Hideyuki Umeda at the University of Tokyo. In his master program, he mainly focused on the explosions of supermassive stars and on their collapse. During his Ph.D. program, he pursued a wide range of research interests, including generative modeling with autoencoders, simulations of pair instability supernovae and of collapsing massive stars. His Ph.D. thesis focused on the explosions of supermassive stars, aided in particular by his development of a general relativistic stability analysis. After receiving his Ph.D. degree, he began work as a Postdoctoral Associate at The Johns Hopkins University.