An engineering professor at Florida Atlantic University for 17 years, Szabo was born in Hungary. He met his wife, Raisa, in 1975 while the two were in graduate school in Kiev, Ukraine. Szabo worked for the Russian space program and later specialized in nuclear power and industrial lasers before he, his wife and their two children defected to the United States in 1985. Upon arriving in South Florida, he first worked in construction to help support his family before accepting his position at FAU. He and his wife also ran Applied Electronics SF, a company focused on biomedical applications.